Flow International Selects Virtela Global Network Services to Reduce Business Costs and Complexity

DENVER, April 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Virtela, the world's largest independent managed network services company, today announced that Flow International Corporation is using Virtela to provide a fully managed wide area network (WAN) that helps reduce the cost and complexity of running global businesses.  Flow (Nasdaq: FLOW) is the world's leading developer and manufacturer of industrial waterjet machines for cutting and cleaning applications.

As Flow's business expanded globally, the company became strained by working with multiple vendors to maintain a virtual private network (VPN) between its U.S. headquarters and branch offices around the world. The decision was made to migrate to an MPLS network and consolidate vendors for greater simplicity and cost-efficiency.  Throughout a rigorous five-month selection process, Virtela proved itself as the best option for global network services from a single source.  With Virtela, Flow now has a fully managed MPLS network that enables communication between its sites in North America, South America, Europe and Asia and easily scales to accommodate new locations.  Flow's network is backed by follow-the-sun customer support from Virtela's three global network and security operations centers and the Flow IT team has complete visibility into network performance through Virtela's online portal, VirtelaView.

"Our enterprise network is critical to enabling our business to compete on a global scale, and we look to Virtela as a worldwide partner for our business, especially as we evaluate expansion opportunities," said Steve Bell, group manager for global infrastructure engineering & datacenter operations at Flow. "Teaming with Virtela has significantly reduced the complexity of supporting international locations since we no longer have to manage multiple contracts from multiple vendors in multiple countries.  This allows us to focus on our core IT mission of supporting the global business."

Unique among network service providers, Virtela intelligently routes customer traffic over its multi-carrier Global Service Fabric(SM), which aggregates and integrates the best local, regional and global networks to offer unparalleled resilience and geographic reach.  In addition to MPLS, Virtela offers an extensive portfolio of managed services – including IP network, security, remote access, device monitoring and management, and application acceleration.  Virtela's carrier- and vendor-agnostic approach allows customers to leverage the best-of-breed network services that meet their specific price and performance needs.  

"Virtela has helped us reduce our overall infrastructure costs by enabling us to run video and VoIP communications over one high-performance network," continued Bell.  "We've been extremely pleased with the availability and uptime of the Virtela network.  Another real strength of the partnership is Virtela's responsiveness, which gives us the ability to be able to add and remove sites very quickly so we can be more dynamic as a business."

"Especially as the economy shows signs of a rebound, companies require network providers that truly act as strategic partners to help them successfully expand while getting the most out of every network dollar they invest," said Vab Goel, Virtela CEO and partner at Norwest Venture Partners."  Our partnership with Flow is an excellent example of how companies can achieve the highest quality network service and support to seamlessly communicate between their global offices while easing expenses at the same time."

About Virtela

Virtela, the world's largest independent managed services company, offers award-winning managed services including MPLS and IP-based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Security, Remote Access, and WAN/LAN Device Monitoring and Management, to some of the most competitive multinational companies in the world. Offering services in 190 countries, Virtela integrates and manages best-of-breed service providers through partnerships with 500+ carriers, to address the unique needs of its customers.

Virtela is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with Global Network Operations Centers in Denver, Mumbai, India and Manila, Philippines. For more information, please call +1 (720) 475-4000 or visit www.virtela.net.

About Flow International

Flow International Corporation is the world's leading developer and manufacturer of ultrahigh-pressure waterjet technology for cutting and cleaning. Flow provides state-of-the-art ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) technology to numerous industries including automotive, aerospace, job shop, surface preparation, food and dozens more. For more information, visit www.flowcorp.com.

SOURCE Virtela