Success story

Company background

ABB Ltd is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact.

It operates from more than 20 locations in the United Kingdom and employs around 2,300 people nationally. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 120,000 people.

The challenge

ABB depends on the constant availability and security of its information. The group therefore uses a managed solution for its data storage requirements, including its business-critical email system. Managed storage is reliable and secure – but it can be very expensive, with many storage providers charging by the gigabyte.

ABB’s challenge was to lower managed storage costs by reducing the amount of data storage being used for email.

The strategy

Email attachments are often sent to several users and saved in multiple locations. This means reducing attachment files sizes by just a few megabytes can make a dramatic difference to storage usage.

ABB UK initially investigated the possibility of employees manually optimizing their files in order to keep attachment sizes down, but it was quickly decided that an automatic solution would be better – one that didn’t rely on people remembering (or having the time and technical skills) to manually optimize their files.

After evaluating a number of potential solutions, ABB UK chose to implement NXPowerLite Desktop Edition as part of a combined project that also included introducing mailbox quotas and archiving to their Lotus Notes environment.

The result

NXPowerLite was deployed with Lotus Notes integration enabled, which ensured that email attachments were automatically optimized as they were sent. This resulted in smaller inboxes and outboxes, meaning that mailboxes for the biggest email users could be kept under their quota limits more easily.

Because the optimization process was entirely automatic, it did not require employees to remember to use the software. And, as optimized files don’t need to be decompressed before use, there was no burden on file recipients (optimized files remain in their original format, so they can be opened and edited by anyone, regardless of whether they have NXPowerLite installed).

In total, introducing mailbox quotas and archiving has reduced total email storage in the UK by more than 85%, saving ABB three terabytes of space and the use of NXPowerLite has contributed positively to the success of the project.

Ongoing storage growth rates are also flattening, partly due to the continued use of the software to optimize email attachments.

Conclusions

ABB are very happy with NXPowerLite and had rolled it out to more than 1,700 employees in several countries, including 25% of the UK workforce, by the end of 2009. The company expects to purchase further NXPowerLite licenses throughout 2010.