About Our Customer

Olympus's success story began in Japan in 1919 and today comprises more than 70 offices in nearly 50 countries globally. Olympus is a multicultural community with more than 5,200 staff across the globe and reported annual sales revenues of over US$4.7 billion in 2003. Focusing on precision equipment and opto-digital systems, Olympus pioneers key technologies for both consumers and industry. The main activity sectors include imaging and information systems, medical systems and precision industrial instrument applications.

Customer Situation

In 2000, Olympus was already an AT&T Frame Relay customer in Europe and Asia Pacific, and decided that in terms of technology and investments it would be better switching to a solution based on the public Internet. This would provide a more cost-effective and pervasive solution for its European network. At the same time, Olympus chose to maintain the frame relay connection between its Japan headquarters and Hong Kong, with the latter connecting their operations in Shanghai, China and more than 10 other cities in mainland China.

Our Solution

Since 2001, 31 Olympus locations in Europe have been connected via AT&T to the Internet. Using the backbone provided by AT&T , O lympus in Europe has implemented its own VPN, manages its own 'black box' VPN devices, and carries out all tunnel management. The Olympus solution is based on the AT&T Global Managed Internet Service (GMIS), which today Olympus is also able to run its mission-critical Enterprise Resource Planning applications on the VPN.

While Olympus is comfortable to implement and operate its own VPN in Europe, it relies on AT&T as a single point of contact for the network implementation and day-to-day management in Japan , Hong Kong and China . A combination of AT&T frame relay network, international private leased circuits and local circuits forms the backbone of the Olympus communication highway for its staff, customers and business partners in Japan , Hong Kong and China , and connects to the Olympus ' counterparts across the globe.

The Results

The AT&T solution met Olympus' functional, operational, global and budgetary requirements. The result is that today Olympus is able to harness the power of an open and flexible solution that will adapt to future migration and evolution needs, yet maintaining the integrity of a secure backbone. Riding on AT&T's expertise in technology and responsiveness, Olympus appreciates the benefits of both additional industry leading Service Level Agreements and the backup solution via ISDN.