Historic Futures Solidifies Its Customer Base by Improving Average Global Application Performance Over 500% While Saving 80% on Infrastructure
Company Size
11-200
Region
- Asia
- Europe
Country
- Bangladesh
- China
- India
- United Kingdom
Product
- String Application
- Dynamic Web Acceleration service
Tech Stack
- Internet-based traceability service
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Networks & Connectivity - Software-Defined Networking
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Track & Trace of Assets
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Historic Futures (HF) is a company recognised for its expertise in supply-chain traceability. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Oxon, UK, HF offers world-leading technologies and consulting expertise. The company’s unique Internet-based traceability service known as String empowers brands and retailers to visualise their entire supply chain, from primary production to finished product. Used by hundreds of businesses, including Gap, Levi’s, Tesco, and Wal-Mart, String helps these leading brands increase information levels across their supply chain, and assure customers that their product quality matches branding claims. HF's customers have established supply chains comprising hundreds or thousands of suppliers dispersed around the globe, sometimes in remote and developing countries.
The Challenge
Historic Futures (HF) offers a unique Internet-based traceability service known as String, which is used by hundreds of businesses, including Gap, Levi’s, Tesco, and Wal-Mart. However, poor Internet performance in critical supply-base countries and regions, such as Bangladesh, China, India, and Southeast Asia, made the String application load at painfully slow speeds. This led suppliers in some areas to complain that the performance of String made the application unusable. As a result, HF’s customers struggled to collect data needed for traceability purposes. HF needed to improve global performance of its application or risk losing customers. HF’s IT team considered how it could serve the application locally in problematic regions. It evaluated some of the largest global hosting providers but found that each one lacked data centre presence in one or more core regions of the world. HF also concluded that building out its own global data centres would put too much strain on its limited IT resources and budget.
The Solution
HF’s hosting provider, UKFast, introduced it to the concept of content delivery network (CDN) services, and in particular, CDNetworks. HF quickly discovered that CDNetworks is one of few CDN service providers in the world that specialises in optimising and improving web application performance. Moreover, as the only global CDN with a leading position in Asia Pacific, CDNetworks was uniquely qualified to enable String’s performance improvements in core regions throughout Asia. Initial tests of CDNetworks Dynamic Web Acceleration service resulted in 300-400% performance improvement where HF was experiencing problems. HF has also enjoyed significant infrastructure savings through its use of Dynamic Web Acceleration. The company is able to serve its global audience from dual data centres in the UK that tie into the cloud-based network of CDNetworks. Thanks to the dramatic performance improvements, HF has started developing a more feature-rich version of the String application.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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