Strategic Decisions Group

Menlo Park, California

For 20 years, Strategic Decisions Group (SDG) has built shareholder value for global Fortune 500 clients including Dow Chemical, DuPont, Shell, Pfizer and Philips Electronics. SDG consultants provide bold, transformative ideas leading organizations to new levels of success in the global marketplace. SDG's mission is to help clients develop and implement creative strategies for increasing value.

Responsible for a worldwide network of consultants and clients, IT Director Carl Foster faced the challenge of providing mobile and geographically dispersed SDG consultants with access to the information they need to do their jobs. To support a collaborative environment, SDG consultants keep the majority of their projects and data in large databases. And, because they frequently travel to client sites, all SDG employees carry laptops with Lotus Notes. These measures, however, solved only part of the company's remote connection problem.

SDG consultants were still experiencing the inconvenience of trying to get a Web connection at each client site they visited. Even if a Web connection was readily available, consultants were wasting valuable time waiting for their large collaborative databases to download. Consultants began accessing the databases through Lotus Notes, but the time-consuming replication had them wasting precious minutes waiting for downloads. Foster recognized this problem and set out to find a solution that would help SDG consultants to quickly and easily access business-critical information in order to deliver optimal service. After all, what client wants to wait around while his consultant, who bills by the hour, spends costly minutes downloading his database?

Then Foster discovered TurboGold from Stampede Technologies. TurboGold uses patented compression, streaming and caching techniques to accelerate the transfer of Lotus Notes and Domino databases, enabling Notes and Domino environments to run up to five times faster. TurboGold delivers a dramatic reduction in telecommunication costs, increases bandwidth capabilities, improves productivity and delays or eliminates costly infrastructure investments.

"Simply put, consultants who have information at their fingertips are more likely to satisfy the client. That's why 98 percent of SDG employees run on laptops. In fact, every SDG employee except the receptionist carries one," said Foster. "The more knowledgeable and productive our consultants are, the better SDG fares as a whole. At SDG, our consultants are our product and, with TurboGold, we are delivering the best, most efficient product possible."

Foster says, "TurboGold makes Lotus Notes a reality. There's nothing else that competes with it." TurboGold ultimately allows SDG consultants to be more productive and professional with clients, which translates into better service from SDG.

SDG is available on the World Wide Web at www.sdg.com.