Schneider Electric is a company with a winning recipe for success.

A focus on innovation and a dedication to delivering quality customer service have been key ingredients to the company's growth over the last 160 years that it has been in business.

Today, as the company continues to grow and move forward with its goal of building "a new electric world," its requirement to stay in touch with employees, partners and customers worldwide through its corporate network remains a priority.

Schneider Electric is a global provider of electrical distribution, industrial control and automation projects. Based in France, the company has operations in more than 130 countries in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It has more than 7,400 sales outlets, 630 marketing offices and 150 manufacturing facilities around the world.

Yet, despite its size, Schneider is focused on providing the responsiveness of a local company with the powerful skills of a large enterprise. To do this, the company requires a corporate network that is reliable, efficient and scaleable to meet its evolving needs. AT&T Global Services provides network services to Schneider Electric across the world. In France, it helps to fulfill the company's communication needs in its 35 sales offices.

The two companies have been working together for a number of years. Their relationship began when AT&T provided Schneider with SNA services, then MPN services and frame relay services until mid-2001. But with the frame relay technology, Schneider had to double its bandwidth every two years in order to support new critical applications and achieve required performance and service levels. As Schneider's business continued to expand globally, the company realized it needed a more robust solution that would support applications with different throughput specifications, plus provide the company with the ability to grow its network easily.

To help meet Schneider's changing network requirements, AT&T recommended its Enhanced VPN service, the company's Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) service. In the summer of 2001, a pilot of the service was initiated in Annency, Grenoble, Lyon and Marne-La-Vallee in France. After a successful pilot, Schneider agreed to work with AT&T to implement the Enhanced VPN service at all its sites throughout France. From November to December 2001, 30 sites were migrated to the MPLS-based service, and as of January 2002, the entire network was migrated to the new service. According to Schneider Electric, AT&T's expertise and quality of service were key to a smooth and successful migration to the new technology.

Today, Schneider's sales offices are realizing numerous benefits from the MPLS service, which integrates Class of Service (CoS) features and 'any to any' connections. CoS helps ensure dedicated optimal bandwidth and latency for the company's most critical applications. AT&T recommended that the company allocate its four classes of services: Class 1 is dedicated to the voice traffic, Class 2 is for transactional applications, Class 3 is used for critical business applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Class 4 is for services that can support longer transit time such as e-mail, intranet access and FTP. With these differentiated service categories, Schneider is able to set up predictable service levels with associated costs for each application it uses. In addition, the company can also monitor its network by accessing AT&T's service level reports available from the Web.

Today, Schneider Electric's stepping up its acquisitions and organic growth, making e-business a strategic priority, extending product lines and developing new innovations. Thanks to AT&T's MPLS-based Enhanced VPN service, Schneider Electric now has a scaleable network that will continue to meet the company's evolving needs.

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