MINNEAPOLIS -- Allot Communications, the Traffic Management Company, today announced that Dixons Group plc. - Europe’s largest retailer of consumer electronics - has selected Allot’s NetEnforcer to monitor and manage its network traffic.

Dixons Group’s external website facilitates thousands of online transactions daily – including inventory management, validating credit cards for customers, collecting shipping information, and executing online retail purchases. The company’s international intranet links 13 different countries and more than 1,400 retail stores operating across the UK and continental Europe. Dixons also deploys Virtual Private Networks across locations in Scandinavia, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, South Africa, the Far East and the USA – which are hosted and managed externally.

When Dixons Group’s network performance began to suffer, due to unmanaged P2P, email, and other non-critical network traffic, the company deployed Allot’s NetEnforcer. NetEnforcer enabled Dixons to monitor its entire Internet network, clearly see traffic and implement policies to prioritize business related traffic, while throttling recreational or frivolous network traffic. Dixons’ IT department was also able to defer non-critical activities - such as backups - and “rate-control” other IP traffic by allocating limited bandwidth during the day, in order to minimize the pressure on their network.

“We were introduced to NetEnforcer by one of our hosting partners, and we decided to take it in-house to manage the rapid increase in traffic across our international network,” said Andrew Gromniak, Dixons’ Senior Infrastructure Consultant. “We’re extremely impressed with NetEnforcer’s monitoring graphs and Deep Packet Inspection capacities – which have helped us identify and control P2P traffic that was consuming about 30-percent of our available bandwidth.”

---In a separate release---

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Allot Communications, the Traffic Management Company, today announced that Nippon Paint has implemented Allot’s NetEnforcer® to deliver voice over IP telephony with standard telephony quality.

With annual revenues of approximately US $1.87 billion, Nippon Paint has been a pioneer in Japan's paint and coating industry since 1881. It manufactures and sells paints for automobiles, steel structures, ships, electrical equipment, roads, houses and more. The company has more than 2000 employees and a Wide Area LAN that connects its Osaka headquarters to its branch offices and factories.

As part of the company's drive for corporate efficiency and cost-cutting, Nippon Paint decided to migrate to phones that use VoIP technology. As the company started the rollout of 700 VoIP-enabled phones, the quality of the VoIP service was not equal to standard telephony, especially at the offices in Tokyo and Neyagawa where they had the heaviest usage.

Nippon Paint decided to purchase four NetEnforcer devices and to place one device at each branch office and two devices on the Ethernet connections at its headquarters.

Allot Communications