Hydrite Chemical

Brookfield, WI

Hydrite Chemical is a privately-held, multi-disciplined chemical production company that combines toll manufacturing and distribution. With approximately 500 employees and annual sales of $200 million, the company has expertise in complex chemical production and other chemical processes, and produces, stores and distributes more than 60 petroleum-based and organic solvent products.

The lifeblood of Hydrite Chemical is its field sales force of 60 agents. Working collaboratively with IBM Lotus Notes through an AS/400 server system, the sales staff began experiencing a problem with their network. With each user replicating up to 30 databases daily, ranging from 8MB to 10MB in size and some with 8,000 or more records, simple replication was taking well over two hours, which was unacceptable. Calls from frustrated salespeople complaining about valuable time being wasted on the replication process started going in to the home office every day.

As director of Information Services, Hydrite’s Jim Krueger realized that his network needed to become more effective. Collaborative sales groups using Lotus Notes were spending valuable time in the field to access mission-critical information or worse yet, would simply turn replication off in Notes and then complain that the data in the databases was not current enough. Something had to be done and Stampede’s TurboGold was the answer.

“Replication times went from an average of over 2 hours to between 30 and 40 minutes, and everyone was much happier,” Krueger says. “Now we hardly get any calls complaining about the speed of replication and sales people are happier and more productive. TurboGold has allowed us to contain connection costs while managing more users and traffic within the existing network.”

TurboGold uses special algorithms to compress data and then puts it into a continuous data stream to minimize the handshaking that occurs for each Lotus packet. Added to this are caching capabilities on both the users’ workstation and the Domino servers, which make the data flow much faster and smoother. TurboGold adapts to different workloads and will grow with Hydrite Chemical’s network as new clients and servers are added. As it does so, TurboGold enhances the flow of Lotus Notes information throughout the enterprise network. Since TurboGold controls soaring connection costs and deploys quickly and transparently to clients, savings can be felt immediately in terms of time, network resources and ROI.

While Hydrite has not calculated the exact dollar savings, the main reason they bought TurboGold was to save time for users and administrators, and in that regard, according to Krueger, "it has certainly exceeded our expectations."

"Salespeople are essential to our success and the better we serve them, the better they serve our customers," explains Krueger. "Getting vital information to them in a quarter of the time makes that happen."

Hydrite Chemical is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.hydrite.com