Ocean Beauty, a large seafood processing firm in the Pacific Northwest, is turning to MCI Communications to solve the complexity of linking 23 locations via virtual private networks.

The company had used premises-based routers and individual DSL or other high-speed links to connect its sites, but as it moves to more centralized applications finds that approach unreliable, said Sentoso Sendjaja, IT director for Ocean Beauty. Instead, his firm will use MCI’s Private IP and SIG Secure Internet Access to consolidate its access and make centralized applications more feasible.

“At every location, we have DSL and ISDN links and use Cisco [Systems] routers to do VPN,” Sendjaja said. “A lot of times, they are not reliable, there is no service level agreement. We have outages of up to a week and no one to help. It is coming to the point that I needed to have something more reliable.”

By migrating to MCI Private IP, Ocean Beauty can use MCI’s SIG network-based firewall capabilities to connect its multiple locations with greater network stability and predictability, and provide employees with more secure access.

“It gives us a single point of service,” Sendjaja said. “With a private IP network, MCI gave us a better infrastructure to meet any current or future needs.”

Ocean Beauty has already centralized its payroll function and is in the process of centralizing ERP--enterprise resources planning--as well, he said.

“Right now we have a server in each location running the same applications, but we are moving to single server,” he said. “I have a small IT shop so it is really hard to manage 23 locations--the centralized approach is working really well.”

In addition, Ocean Beauty will soon replace its telephone system and is planning to move to voice-over-IP on the MCI Private IP backbone.