HOOFDDORP, The Netherlands -- KPNQwest, the leading pan-European data communications and hosting company, announced today that it has signed a deal with the Austrian technology group Andritz, a global market leader in high-tech production systems for pulp, paper, steel and other specialised industries, to provide a 20-site, 8-country IP VPN service. Under the terms of the deal, KPNQwest will provide Andritz with a robust and scalable IP VPN service to interconnect sites in Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, France, Canada and the United States. The solution will provide an advanced all-IP platform to support Andritz's business-critical applications and e-mail systems, enabling employees to access and share information across one centralised corporate network. It will also support ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications across its global network. The solution is deployed across the largest, densest and most advanced fibre-optic backbone in Europe with full interoperability to a 160,000km global network with virtually unlimited bandwidth. This unsurpassed potential can be used to support the delivery of bandwidth-rich data files or business-critical applications with the level of latency reduced to a bare minimum for ensuring the fastest possible Round Trip Times (RTTs). "While the migration to the IP VPN service will help reduce our networking costs and add new efficiencies, we selected KPNQwest because its wholly-owned network provided the quality of service and service level agreement we required," said Heiner Fellner-Feldegg, Head of IT Communications of Andritz.KPNQwest NV