Flow International Selects Virtela Global Network Services To Reduce Business Costs And Complexity

DENVER, April 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Virtela, the world's largest independent managed network services company, today announced that Flow International Corporation is using Virtela to provide a fully managed wide area network (WAN) that helps reduce the cost and complexity of running global businesses.  Flow (Nasdaq: FLOW) is the world's leading developer and manufacturer of industrial waterjet machines for cutting and cleaning applications.

As Flow's business expanded globally, the company became strained by working with multiple vendors to maintain a virtual private network (VPN) between its U.S. headquarters and branch offices around the world. The decision was made to migrate to an MPLS network and consolidate vendors for greater simplicity and cost-efficiency.  Throughout a rigorous five-month selection process, Virtela proved itself as the best option for global network services from a single source.  With Virtela, Flow now has a fully managed MPLS network that enables communication between its sites in North America, South America, Europe and Asia and easily scales to accommodate new locations.  Flow's network is backed by follow-the-sun customer support from Virtela's three global network and security operations centers and the Flow IT team has complete visibility into network performance through Virtela's online portal, VirtelaView.

"Our enterprise network is critical to enabling our business to compete on a global scale, and we look to Virtela as a worldwide partner for our business, especially as we evaluate expansion opportunities," said Steve Bell, group manager for global infrastructure engineering & datacenter operations at Flow. "Teaming with Virtela has significantly reduced the complexity of supporting international locations since we no longer have to manage multiple contracts from multiple vendors in multiple countries.  This allows us to focus on our core IT mission of supporting the global business."

Unique among network service providers, Virtela intelligently routes customer traffic over its multi-carrier Global Service Fabric(SM), which aggregates and integrates the best local, regional and global networks to offer unparalleled resilience and geographic reach.  In addition to MPLS, Virtela offers an extensive portfolio of managed services – including IP network, security, remote access, device monitoring and management, and application acceleration.  Virtela's carrier- and vendor-agnostic approach allows customers to leverage the best-of-breed network services that meet their specific price and performance needs.