Highlights
- The European IT services company, with its 1,000 employees, supports more than 3,000 stores and manages two million connected objects in eight countries. It has a yearly turnover of €120 million.
- Providing service to access-limited areas — where infrastructure is difficult to reach for upgrades, troubleshooting, and recovery — can be challenging.
- The company’s infrastructure team is renowned for its expertise in designing global, flexible, cost-effective solutions that cater to the demands of the “anytime, anyplace, any device” retail era. With the integration of Opengear, they now have remote access to any site at any time.
Customer story
This IT services company is a subsidiary of a prominent European cooperative society and hypermarket chain established in the 1940s. With its independent European stores, this cooperative is renowned for providing quality products at competitive prices. In today’s retail landscape, having a robust IT system that can adapt to changing market trends, purchasing behavior, and cross-channel commerce is crucial for any retail brand’s success. The engineers at this IT services company design flexible and scalable IT solutions that help retail brands achieve their commercial goals. These solutions are built to meet today’s customers’ “anytime, anyplace, any device” needs, making it easier for them to access retail brands’ products and services.
Thanks to its innovative approach and commitment to catering to customers’ changing needs, the IT services organization has grown over the years, has 1,000 employees, and supports more than 3,000 stores. Additionally, by supporting two million connected objects in eight countries, it has a yearly turnover of more than €120 million.
Challenge
To keep up with the demands of digitalization, these cooperative hypermarket chain stores require a reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure. Hence, the IT services company deploys hyper-converged solutions tailored to each business’s needs, combining virtualization and high availability. It ensures that these independent stores operate at their peak efficiency.
However, providing service to limited-access areas where infrastructure is difficult to reach for upgrades, troubleshooting, and recovery presents challenges. Additionally, meeting the SLA requirements of these independent stores by ensuring 24/7 uptime with limited on-site staff can be difficult. The infrastructure team of the IT services company has learned these lessons on several occasions when telecommunications outages resulted in unreachable critical network devices.
The IT services company established a telecommunications team in 2013 to provide high-speed optical fiber directly to these independent European stores. Their cutting-edge infrastructure ensures these independent stores can access reliable internet for seamless operations and excellent customer experiences. The optical fiber solutions are purpose-built to meet the unique demands of retail environments, providing ultra-fast connectivity to support robust point-of-sale systems, facilitating smooth online transactions, and ensuring uninterrupted communication.
Yet, given the outages they had experienced, the team identified a need for an out-of-band network to support their complex infrastructure and six points of presence (PoPs) across Europe. They needed extra help to access and monitor their infrastructure swiftly and efficiently.
Solution
The IT services organization sought to enhance the quality and dependability of its IT infrastructure. They decided to adopt an out-of-band network for this purpose. After seeking advice from their reseller, they assessed Opengear and tested its platform. They found Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform to be highly dependable and secure. Satisfied with the test results, they kicked off their implementation by deploying the ACM7008 Resilience Gateway.
The ACM7008 Resilience Gateway provides secure remote access to network devices via Smart Out of Band management. With an embedded, global 4G-LTE cellular modem, it offers an alternate path in case the primary link is unavailable.
According to the organization’s project engineer, their network team has realized that Opengear provides support throughout the entire network lifecycle. The platform delivers enhanced features that are useful during initial deployments on the first day, during outages on the worst day, and for controlling and monitoring ports every day.
Now, when the network team identifies a malfunctioning router or a firewall in one of the PoPs, they can securely access and reboot it with Opengear. The team mentions how Opengear’s platform minimizes the impact of disruptions and supports their business continuity for the company and its customers. By using Opengear, they can reduce OpEx and accelerate the time to remediation.
“After deploying Opengear in one of our data centers and getting results, our Infrastructure team decided to roll it out in our other data centers. We are now discussing with our colleagues the possibility of implementing Opengear in independent stores throughout Europe.”
Project Manager for the Network Infrastructure Team
Results
With the integration of Opengear, the infrastructure team now has remote access to any site at any time. The capability helps them continue to deliver solutions for the anytime, anyplace, any device retail era.
With Opengear, the IT services company has successfully decreased third-party smart-hands costs, which has lowered overall operational expenditure. Since implementing Opengear, the network team has saved an average of €1,250 by reducing data center visits and around 35-50 full-time employee hours during the last six months. Moreover, they can rely on their team to promptly and effectively address any telecommunication connectivity issues that may arise.
The team has been discussing the possibility of implementing Opengear in independent cooperative stores throughout Europe. They are collaborating with their colleagues responsible for networking at these stores. Since the beginning of the year, the company has been deploying Opengear ACM7008-2-L in remote stores in northwestern Europe, with other stores to follow upon the team’s successful validation of Opengear’s solutions. The team is confident that Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform will prove to be especially beneficial for independent cooperative stores. Opengear’s Smart Out of Band solution will enable the network teams of these stores to promptly access critical network devices when they face outages, ensuring that they can continue serving their stakeholders and customers.