The software, installed in August for less than $10,000, helped categorize the priority of WAN traffic as high, medium and low based on Perini's input on what were the most critical traffic streams, Holden said. E-mail was judged to be the highest, along with voice over IP (VoIP) between Framingham and other Perini offices around the world. File Transfer Protocol traffic was judged to be medium-low, with the lowest priority given to user access to Internet radio sites.

"We discovered people were listening to radio online more than I thought and that was taking most of the traffic," she said. After CTM software relegated Internet radio traffic to a low priority, performance dropped -- and so did the number of people listening to it.

"I didn't have to slap anybody's hands and say, 'No, you can't listen to Internet radio,'" she said. In fact, she never had to tell anybody what was happening because the users simply stopped using Internet radio when performance lagged.

"Boy, we haven't heard a boo from anybody since CTM was put in place, and the user community is just not calling us with complaints that it took 20 minutes to enter information in the project management software," Holden said.

Next year, Perini is considering using other Converged Access products to compress VoIP traffic between global offices, especially between Iraq and Afghanistan and several U.S. offices, she said.