Jeans manufacturer Lee Cooper is to halve its computer networking costs by adopting a virtual network model.

The company has signed a three-year deal with vendor Vanco, which will transfer systems to a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network, allowing bandwidth for business-critical applications to be prioritised over email and file transfers.

Lee Cooper will move seven sites in the UK, France, Belgium and Tunisia from a DSL network to MPLS, and expects to make cost savings of 47 per cent.

The MPLS network will also allow the UK clothing firm to

prioritise and organise financial data, fashion designs, enterprise resource planning information, and marketing materials that travel between its Slough head office, Paris design centre and manufacturing site in Tunisia.

‘Email and other internet applications have blossomed over the past few years, so we needed a network that would ensure that our core business applications were not affected by file transfers or email,’ said David Scollen, IT director at Lee Cooper. ‘We also wanted to get the bandwidth costs down, as they have dropped considerably recently.’

The company has also started using Vanco’s ‘Active Backup’

service to improve business continuity of core systems. If the MPLS network fails, vital systems will now switch to the DSL network normally used for non-critical applications, such as email and internet browsing.

‘If there was a problem in the past, we would switch over to ISDN, but now we are moving to DSL, which provides us with higher bandwidth,’ said Scollen.

Lee Cooper is also considering whether to switch its voice network to the MPLS network and use cheaper internet telephony technology. ‘At the moment telephony is a separate system but we are looking at IP over internet,’ said Scollen.