M.A. Mortenson: Boosts Employee Productivity By 300 Percent

When a corporation has multiple projects underway simultaneously, and those projects are spread out around the globe, having an advanced network in place that can disseminate a wide range of applications is paramount. But corporate executives face a challenge when it comes to choosing the right network platform to deliver secure, always-on connectivity to the most remote areas, especially when its current network already operates a bouquet of applications. That was the challenge M.A. Mortenson faced when it needed to upgrade its network platform. Satellite-enabled technology offered executive management a sound solution.
Mortenson is a family-owned construction company founded in 1954 and headquartered in Minneapolis, Minn. The company oversees projects ranging from corporate office buildings and health care projects to network/data centers, sports venues and hotels throughout the United States and internationally. Mortenson also specializes in wind power construction projects. Many of these are built in locations far from anything resembling a broadband connection. At some sites, even mobile phone coverage is lacking. An example of such a project was undertaken in Hawaii. The 30-megawatt wind energy project, built for UPC Wind Partners, is located on the island of Maui on the side of a dormant volcano called Halemahina. This project, which consisted of 20 GE Wind Energy 1.5-megawatt turbines, 5.8 miles of roads and 6,000 cubic yards of concrete for the foundations, started in July 2005 and was completed in May 2006. Communicating and relaying project information from such a desolate area proved to be a challenge for Mortenson’s executives.
Given such limitations, Mortenson had to find a long-term solution to this daily dilemma. In a time-sensitive business where scheduling delays can cost thousands of dollars, Mortenson’s corporate executives had to combat a continuing challenge: to keep projects on-schedule by enabling employees to communicate in real time.
This was critical for numerous reasons, least of which included the fact that employees ran highly interactive applications that relayed information from job sites back to headquarters. “We utilize Citrix to perform financial scheduling and estimating task with our ERP applications,” says Mark Calkins, Enterprise Systems Lead for Mortenson. Executives already were vested in the Citrix infrastructure that makes it easier to connect people to applications and information from any location. But due to the chatty nature of Citrix with any device, a long road lay ahead prior to discovering the right satellite technology that worked with Citrix and provided a positive user experience.

Temporary Servers On The Job Site

After much experimentation, the department hit on a partial solution. “We would configure and ship a temporary server to each remote location,” says Calkins. “Then we arranged for satellite connectivity to link the servers to our network hub. The link wasn’t very good. It had a lot of latency. But it allowed us to replicate Lotus Notes and Expedition [a project management system] at the project site and refresh it every night.” These and most of the company’s other applications are delivered through Citrix.
The solution worked, but was far from ideal. “The project staff didn’t like the fact that they couldn’t work on project documents or view photos in real time,” says Calkins. “We also couldn’t give them
access to Mortenson’s corporate intranet due to latency.”
From the corporate point of view, lack of application access on the job site translated into lost employee productivity. In addition, the IT department spent an estimated 30 to 40 hours to set up a temporary server and a further 10 hours per week to maintain it — time that could have been devoted to much higher value work. The breaking point came when the company decided to move to Oracle’s e-Business Suite for its primary enterprise applications. The high interactivity requirements of the system made it impossible to roll it out on temporary servers. Satellite remained the sole means to connect with truly remote locations – but there seemed to be no way that satellite could deliver the secure LAN-like service the company required.

LAN-Like Performance Via Satellite

By March 2006 Mortenson’s IT department had nearly 30 users at three sites connected through a satellite-delivered VPN, using Citrix to provide real-time access to Oracle applications, the company intranet and the Internet. Mortenson integrated End II End Communications’ Optimal family of software products that secure and optimize the satellite links for its network connection. With this software in place, including End II End’s optimized VPN, Mortenson had a solid solution for communications among its project sites, no longer relying on cell phones and inadequate e-mail connections. Calkins says that it took two weeks to test the new platform at headquarters. End II End’s product was integrated immediately, and the satellite installation at the site locations took about five days.
Mortenson’s new platform with the software products fully integrated enabled the running of Citrix, Oracle, Lotus Notes and other highly interactive applications, with LAN-like performance. It replaces multiple proprietary network devices, offers end-to-end AES 256 encryption from the data center to every remote site and provides unified management of all sites on the network. With such a robust feature set, Mortenson executives discovered that such a system can be installed by non-technical staff at remote sites.
“We needed something cost-effective and manageable,” says Calkins. “We occasionally do not get much lead time for the start-up of a new site, and there’s a lot of mobility in this company. We’re bringing sites up and taking them down all the time. The solution had to be something we could support and deliver on a consistent basis.” Today, Mortenson has roughly 100 project sites networked back to it data center.
Meeting the need meant more than selling software. End II End also provided logistical and technical support to enable rapid deployment, and Calkins adds that the company worked with his team to resolve technical issues with the satellite connection. Prior to this new platform, Mortenson executives had a significant challenge functioning on a network that continually created operational issues for the project teams.

Windfarms and Military Bases

The first site equipped with the new software was on the side of a volcano in Maui, Hawaii, where Mortenson was building another wind farm project. Next up was another wind farm in the wilds of Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. The third site was at the Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri, where Mortenson was building a veterinary clinic. “From beginning to end it took about three weeks to order, coordinate and install,” says Calkins.
Early in the evaluation period, Calkins’ team tested the End II End software against a Cisco 3002 router over a satellite link. They found that, when they had just one user on the remote end, the two devices worked about equally well. This came as no surprise, since one user had access to a surplus of bandwidth. As they added users, however, the Cisco router’s performance degraded so drastically as to be unusable. “It was due to the encryption overhead of the router,” says Calkins. “We could improve the performance somewhat by lowering the encryption level, but who wants to make that kind of trade-off? With End II End, we could run at the maximum encryption
setting with multiple users and still get
great performance.”
The connectivity enhancement was not the only return Mortenson achieved on its network upgrade. “We saw a reduction in the initial setup of the system that was deployed to the project site,” says Calkins. “With this new system, we can deploy a fully functional office anywhere we need to do business.”
In addition to significant labor savings in the IT department, Calkins estimates that the End II End solution, by making it possible to run all of the company’s Citrix-based applications, is responsible for a 300 percent gain in employee productivity at the job sites. “For anybody who is using Citrix and has challenges like the ones we’ve had, this is an ideal solution,” says Calkins.
Moving forward, Calkins’ team plans
on expanding its satellite-enabled network for any project where they cannot get or it is cost prohibitive to implement MPLS, cable or DSL. Mortenson discovered that LAN-like security and performance can
be attained when terrestrial solutions
fall short.