Monsanto

Monsanto Enhances Collaboration with Cisco, Microsoft Technologies

Monsanto, one of the world’s leading agricultural companies, takes advantage of team collaboration and ubiquitous access to corporate information in its global business processes. But aging technology was creating slow connections and frustrations for users who wanted to expedite the transfer of documents and other information. To boost productivity and bandwidth, Monsanto deployed Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Cisco Wide Area Application Services. The result is that Monsanto employees have better tools for collaborating and for publishing information. In addition, use of bandwidth has been greatly improved, so people working in remote areas with limited connectivity options can experience LAN-like performance.

Situation

Monsanto is a global agricultural business that applies biotechnology and genomics—the science that improves plant breeding by mining and mapping a plant’s genetic material—to help farmers improve their operations. Monsanto’s agricultural products help maximize the yield potential of seeds so farmers can produce crops more efficiently. A world leader in the agricultural productivity sector, Monsanto manufactures Roundup brand herbicides that are used by farmers and consumers alike.

We’ve been pursuing a goal of improving global collaboration for a number of years, and with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Cisco WAAS, we’re making it happen.  Joseph Ziha Global Communication Services Lead Monsanto

Monsanto employs more than 19,000 people across 385 widely dispersed locations, including administrative sites, sales offices, manufacturing plants, seed production facilities, and research centers in 47 countries. Fostering global communications—both among employees and between the company and its customers, distributors, and partners—has long been a focus for the IT organization at Monsanto to facilitate team collaboration and continuous access to corporate information.

For a variety of reasons, enabling that collaboration has not always been easy. First, Monsanto has several collaboration platforms, portals, and portal technologies. These include a company intranet and TeamSpace, an internal collaborative tool used by the company’s global researchers and technologists to share files and documents such as research papers, Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® presentation graphics program, and image files, including photographs and video. Both were built with some of the best collaboration technologies available at the time of implementation in the early 2000s.

However, the flexibility and functionality of the tools could not keep up with the ever-increasing demands of users, such as the ability to rapidly create spontaneous team collaboration sites, easily integrate document management tasks with the portals and Microsoft Office—the company’s business productivity software—or conduct easy searches for information.

Monsanto employees also experienced frequent problems with connectivity. Employees in Monsanto’s 385 global sites use the company’s Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) wide area network (WAN) to access the centralized services, including the intranet and TeamSpace, which are hosted in the company’s data center in St. Louis, Missouri. The challenges with making these services and applications easily available require optimizing WAN bandwidth, especially in rural areas where copper and fiber services are limited or nonexistent. For example, the company has seed manufacturing facilities in the rural areas of Brazil and India. Connections in these locations can be as slow as 256 kilobytes per second.

“Telecom services are not even available in some locations, which means we need to use satellite or line-of-site radio,” says Joseph Ziha, Global Communications Services Lead for the Monsanto IT department. “Bandwidth in remote areas is costly, so optimizing what we do have is essential.”

In addition to optimizing bandwidth, Monsanto IT administrators wanted to find a means of accelerating the performance of collaborative applications. “To collaborate effectively on a global basis, people need to be able to upload or download 10–15 megabyte research files as if they were local,” says Vincent Arter, Portals and Collaboration Lead for the Monsanto IT department.

Ziha notes that WAN optimization and application acceleration are mission-critical for aspects of Monsanto business operations. During growing season—which can occur two or three times a year in temperate zones—researchers collect and store many gigabytes of data about crop production. Then research teams in St. Louis pull in all of this data for analysis so they can recommend which seed lines to promote to the next level of manufacturing. Once an analysis is complete, the Monsanto employees in the remote sites need to quickly retrieve the reports over the network to make their decisions within a few days.

“Delays in data exchange between the field researchers and the analysts in St. Louis can result in a missed window to plant crop for the next growing season,” says Ziha, “setting the company back from six months to a year.”

Collaborating across different areas and on different projects is vital to what we do, and the deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has really enhanced that capability.  Vincent Arter Portals and Collaboration Lead Monsanto

Solution

Monsanto addressed its global collaboration and connectivity issues with a multilevel approach involving Microsoft software and a Cisco application optimization solution. 

To assist employees in their collaboration and document-sharing efforts, the company decided to use Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, which it deployed as part of its enterprisewide upgrade to Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Monsanto is using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to completely replace its older intranet software and create an entirely new intranet called Monsanto Connection, and is planning to use it to replace the existing software that provides the TeamSpace functions.

Monsanto also decided to use Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the foundation for internal search functionality. A small Web service created by a Monsanto software engineer acts as an interface between Monsanto intranet sites and the Office SharePoint Server 2007 search feature, allowing employees to find all types of documents and specific information from within Office SharePoint Server 2007, including unstructured data such as e-mail messages.

In addition, the company optimized existing bandwidth and significantly accelerated the performance for both Monsanto Connection and TeamSpace by using Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS). Cisco WAAS is a powerful application acceleration and WAN optimization solution that enhances the performance of any Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-based application operating in a WAN environment.

Monsanto partnered with Cisco to develop the overall WAAS architecture. The Monsanto IT group selected 107 sites to participate based on their number of users and network activity.

The IT group deployed a Cisco Wide Area Application Engine appliance running the WAAS solution at all of the sites and at the Monsanto data center. WAN traffic flows between the appliances, which optimize bandwidth using techniques such as compression and caching to provide strong acceleration techniques for Office SharePoint Server 2007. The result is that employees in remote locations with slower connections can use Monsanto Connection and TeamSpace over the WAN while experiencing the fast performance typically associated with local area networks.

Benefits

The decision to tackle both the software and hardware aspects of its collaboration tools has resulted in a number of benefits for Monsanto. The company’s IT department made Monsanto Connection easier to use for employees by deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007, especially for tasks such as publishing announcements and making information about particular research projects instantly available across the enterprise. The IT staff also helped dramatically improve application access and performance by installing the Cisco WAN optimization technology. This has resulted in more efficient use of existing bandwidth, faster file downloads, and quicker employee access to corporate news.

Improved Collaboration

Monsanto has greatly improved its global collaboration capabilities by deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 to use with productivity applications like Microsoft Office Word and Office Excel® spreadsheet software, Arter says.

By accelerating document sharing over the WAN, Cisco WAAS is encouraging document sharing and collaboration among employees in our global locations.  Vincent Arter Portals and Collaboration Lead Monsanto

“Collaborating across different areas and on different projects is vital to what we do, and the deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has really enhanced that capability,” he says. “The biggest benefit is that it is so much easier to publish information quickly to the intranet, whether it’s research information, announcements from particular offices, or corporate news. The tight integration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with applications like Office Word and Office Excel—and the ability to do things like simply drag documents into the SharePoint site—makes the publication of information a virtually seamless, effortless task.”

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is expected to greatly improve the functionality of TeamSpace, making the creation of new collaboration sites almost instantaneous, Arter adds that the search function is becoming a highly valued tool.

“We wanted to go beyond Web crawling to searching business databases and connecting people around the world,” says Arter. “With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can unlock information in a variety of internal resources so we can better use data and reap the benefits of our investments in existing technologies and databases.”

Better Use of Bandwidth, Faster File Downloads

Overall bandwidth usage has decreased by 50 percent in the sites using Cisco WAAS, which means that the same link can accommodate about twice as much traffic as in the past without becoming saturated.

“Cisco WAAS helps us fit 10 gallons in a 5-gallon bucket,” says Dwight Wheeler, Network and Unified Communications Architect for Monsanto. “Employees have noticed the difference. People are telling us that they can access documents much faster.”

File downloads are also significantly faster. The Monsanto IT team measured the time to open a 13.8 megabyte Office Excel file on a server in St. Louis from an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Without Cisco WAAS, opening the file through Office SharePoint Server 2007 took 4.5 minutes. With Cisco WAAS, opening it the first time took just 1.3 minutes—a performance increase of about 71 percent. Opening the same file subsequently, after it was cached, took just 8 seconds. And another application that previously took 4 minutes to open each morning now opens in 30 seconds.

Monsanto’s testing also showed that Cisco WAAS noticeably improves performance of the Microsoft Common Internet Files System (CIFS) and HTTP protocols. For users, this means much less time spent waiting for applications to open and files to download.

“People have stopped calling IT to say that it takes too long to download their documents,” says Arter. “By accelerating document sharing over the WAN, Cisco WAAS is encouraging document sharing and collaboration among employees in our global locations.”

Faster Access to Corporate Portal

By deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Cisco WAAS technology, Monsanto employees can also get company news much faster. “Previously, every time any employee in an office opened the company’s old news portal, an average of 1.5 megabytes of data traveled over the network,” says Ziha. “In offices with low-bandwidth links, just one or two connections would saturate the network so that nobody could get any work done for several minutes until the download was complete. Our remote employees were either waiting until later in the morning to get company news or not using the portal at all.”

Now, with the SharePoint version of Monsanto Connection and Cisco WAAS, employees can connect at any time—and complaints to IT have ceased. The first time a particular employee accesses the site, 500 kilobytes of traffic travels over the network. Some of that information is cached, so subsequent hits to the site use only a fraction of the initial bandwidth. An office whose link would previously support just two simultaneous connections can now easily support 20.

Ziha says that Monsanto plans to provide more offices with Cisco WAAS appliances, and also to use the solution to accelerate other applications, including file sharing and e-mail. Because bandwidth is no longer so constrained, the company can add more rich content to Monsanto Connection, including graphics and video, to make it even more useful to employees.

“It’s been good to work with companies like Cisco and Microsoft on this project because they understand what we are trying to accomplish with our business,” says Ziha. “We’ve been pursuing a goal of improving global collaboration for a number of years, and with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Cisco WAAS, we’re making it happen. With their help, we can roll out new solutions and capture business value faster.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Cisco Systems products and services, call (408) 526-4000 or visit the Web site at:
www.cisco.com

For more information about Monsanto products and services, call (314) 694-1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.monsanto.com

Microsoft Office System

The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office 

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published July 2008