Utility Companies

Utility companies are focused on value, with the potential for small incremental cost savings to have a very large overall effect. Companies with large IT budgets are continually under pressure to get more for their money.

In a large organization, systems which once were separate will gradually be driven together in consolidation as the business attempts to eliminate duplication and waste. Reliability is also a key concern, if for no other reason than the high costs of outages to the business in terms of lost revenue, productivity, reputation and customers. Utility companies also suffer from the substantial IT time commitment required to recover systems following an outage.

We Energies

“50% Reduction in System Complexity”

We've tested other proxy servers and load balancers - ZXTM is number one. ZXTM's GUI makes it easy for anyone to use - they love it.

Juan Alcaraz, Senior Engineer, We Energies
Case Study

Case Study: We Energies

We Energies was looking to upgrade its existing Cisco content switch and web proxy hardware and put the project out to tender. Zeus Technology proposed ZXTM to consolidate their multiple layers of proxy and load balancer infrastructure, adding native SSL capabilities and reducing both the complexity of their architecture and the bottom-line cost.

The challenge

The utility company's incumbent load balancer and web proxy solution was in need of a performance upgrade in order to cope better with the increasing load of web site traffic. The web sites supported by this infrastructure are public-facing, and therefore must be kept available and responsive at all times. As a result, they needed a web server protection solution which would allow them to migrate from the existing infrastructure to the new without disruption.

The solution

As a multi-capability solution, ZXTM was able to replicate and improve upon their existing load balancer and web proxy architecture using TrafficScript™, and allows the old and new systems to be run in parallel to avoid disruption. In doing so, the relatively complex architecture was consolidated into a unified traffic management layer which performed both required functions. ZXTM was deployed on standard server hardware sourced from and supported by the company's usual supplier.

The payback

The utility company has a more capable, more easily-maintained web infrastructure than the previous solution, and at a significantly reduced bottom-line cost. This has a correspondingly positive effect on IT support costs. ZXTM's unique TrafficCluster™ scalability gives the company a path to future capacity expansion without the requirement to redeploy the entire solution from scratch once again. By deploying ZXTM on standard server hardware from the existing supplier, preferential pricing kept costs down without having to compromise on hardware support and maintenance.

Key solution features

TrafficCluster™ scalability - Ensures that the public-facing services managed by ZXTM are always available and have enough capacity, and can be scaled up without the constraint of deploying in pairs
TrafficScript™ - The most powerful and intuitive traffic routing language available
Cost-effective SSL - High-performance software SSL gives the lowest cost per transaction on the market with the need for expensive cryptographic hardware