Founded by a team of IT professionals with a shared passion for speed, Silverstone-based Bspoke Global Networks (BGN) is a specialist network company focussed on high-end premier car and motorbike racing clients across the world. It delivers tailored global connectivity solutions and managed service deployments designed to meet the most demanding, time critical, high performance customers on five continents.
“We build boundary-less communications networks that bring the action to anywhere, live, so everyone is working in real-time,” said Gustav Sallander, Managing Director at Bspoke Global Networks. “Whether it’s Australia or Azerbaijan, Monaco or Malaysia, Silverstone or Singapore – the network, internet and the high bandwidth connection to the factory back home have to work with zero data loss, 100% uptime and maximum capacity. There is no room for error or latency.”
BGN works with elite global motorsport teams across all Formulas and Series, their support services and administrative bodies, delivering cutting-edge technology solutions. BGN’s customers operate at long-haul global distances, yet need LAN performance for applications and systems that are real-time and impact on the track performance of their race operations.
“Our customers suffer from the negative impact of global latency on WAN operations with the resultant slow-down in application function, alongside a lack of traffic management and control, often driven by poor monitoring capabilities and a lack of cohesive traffic visibility,” said Sallander.
To address these issues, BGN set out to find a WAN optimisation solution that could match the high expectations of its motorsport customers and put Riverbed in the driving seat. Riverbed’s solution has given back BGN’s customers visibility, control and assured performance across the globe. The result being consistent predictable delivery of file synchronisation transfers and real-time data telemetry between locations at LAN speed.
Customers regain control of their global networks and are able to leverage maximum performance, with granular visibility of traffic flows, insight into data movements and the ability to ensure efficient utilisation and link saturation, 24/7.
One of the main benefits is the speed of deployment of BGN’s managed service, which is able to achieve rapid gains on WAN operations, with even modest configurations in place. “We frequently see customer WAN issues resolved in hours,” said Sallander. “Applications that had failed to perform globally, suddenly deliver. File transfers that were operating outside of an acceptable timeframe come in on time, while WAN utilisation is maximised for prolonged periods. Our racing team customers see WAN throughput multipliers in excess of 3x or 4x line speed and enjoy visibility and monitoring capabilities previously unknown to them.”
In one case, a top tier motorsport team was having problems getting car data back to its UK HQ in a timely enough manner to allow critical engineering decisions to be taken to improve the cars’ performance. After the first race event following deployment of WAN optimisation, the team’s Head of Vehicle Performance claimed it had, “revolutionised their opportunity to engineer the car.” The data had got back in a time frame they had never experienced, giving them a window to simulate, analyse and re-engineer the car for the next day, to the point where they believe they achieved a higher grid position in qualifying and a competitive advantage on the track.
BGN is now extending its WAN optimisation solutions with factory and track-side links to wind tunnel facilities and engine partner sites to give its customers a winning formula.