High-End Retail Improves Customer Experience Upgrading Wan Across 350 Locations
Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CUSTOMER TYPE: Department Store
INDUSTRY: Retail
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
- Upgrade network to SD-WAN
- Scale roll-out and management to 350 locations
SOLUTION
- LiveNX single-pane-of-glass network performance management from LiveAction
BUSINESS RESULTS
- Seamless deployment of Cisco IWAN across 350 locations
- Enhanced customer experience in retail locations and online in 96 countries
CHALLENGE
This chain of high-end department stores opened its first location in 1901. It is now an omnichannel retailer with 350 stores in North America and online customers in 96 countries. In an enterprise-wide initiative to create the best possible customer experience through continuous innovation, the network team researched software-defined networking, eventually settling on Cisco’s Intelligent WAN to power their corporate network. IWAN offered the flexibility and economy of SD-WAN, while simultaneously reducing network costs.
As the team prepared to roll-out IWAN across 350 retail locations, it became apparent that they required a platform to simplify and automate the process of configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting the solution for this large-scale deployment.
”LiveNX provides the ongoing visibility into the Cisco IWAN solution that we require.”
– Principal Network Engineer for a High-End Retail Store
SOLUTION
The networking team selected LiveNX, the application-aware network performance management platform from LiveAction. As the Cisco-recommended management solution for IWAN, LiveNX leverages the collective network-performance management experience found at LiveAction, a considerable asset that is baked into the platform. As a result, tight integration between LiveNX and IWAN provides operational efficiency while mitigating risk. Even with teams that have varied levels of experience, live and online training assures that all members can effectively use the solution.
RESULTS
The single-pane-of-glass capabilities of LiveNX provided the rich visualization the retailer needed for an issue-free rollout. Different views allowed them to validate traffic path configuration and performance across all sites, ensure that the traffic loads were balanced, monitor the network for alerts by site pairs, application groups, and service providers, and quickly identify and resolve anomalies.
Quality of service (QoS) configuration and management was an area of concern for the network team. Manual configuration via a command-line interface was not only vulnerable to typos and errors, it had the added liability that it wouldn’t scale in a deployment across 350 locations. The GUI-based QoS configuration and management tool in LiveNX allowed the team to create reference configurations for specific use cases and quickly replicate them across hundreds of devices with a few mouse clicks and without ever having to resort to the command line.
”LiveNX provides the ongoing visibility into the Cisco IWAN solution that we require,” the principal network engineer said.
About LiveAction®
LiveAction provides end-to-end visibility of network and application performance from a single pane of glass. We provide enterprises with confidence that the network is meeting business objectives, full network visibility for better decisions, and reduced cost to operate the network.
