Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

The software-defined expedition at hand has taken hold from the data center to the c-suite – And now, mobile retail. Marketers know digital is the new black in today’s always on, always plugged-in reality, and today Britain’s largest mobile network operator and one of its leading mobile communications retailers, EE, selected InfoVista’s (News - Alert) Application-Aware SD-WAN to ensure its in-store applications perform as expected.

BT Group (News - Alert), the parent company of EE, will leverage BT’s managed service Connect Intelligence to deploy Ipanema throughout its 553 store network. As a result of the deployment, EE gains vastly improved visibility into application performance on the network, and can now prioritize applications and promise high performance for critical applications.

“Leveraging BT’s Connect Intelligence service powered by InfoVista, we gain visibility and control we need to prioritize all of our business-critical in-store applications across the entire store network,” said Chris Williams, director of IT service management at EE. “With this deployment, we are able to consolidate multiple WAN circuits into one, which reduces our store network costs substantially, while allowing us to fully optimize our application performance and deliver the best customer experience.”

InfoVista recently unveiled Ipanema 9.1, which added improved visualization supported by statistics, real-time plotting, and filtering options for fortifying the invaluable insight and performance provided by SD-WAN solutions. In implementing Ipanema (News - Alert), EE can now cut costs by consolidating several communications links at each retail location to one circuit; and each application section is ensured to perform at expected levels via InfoVista’s industry unique per-session granularity.

Sylvain Quartier, senior vice president, product strategy enterprises, InfoVista, noted, “Today’s consumers expect new digital experiences, such as access to in-store Wi-Fi, receiving location-based offers triggered by beacons, or mobile checkout. With Ipanema, retail enterprises can effectively deliver on these experiences while simultaneously protecting the speed and reliability of business-critical applications, both old and new, such as those supporting checkout processes.”

One doesn’t necessarily connect SD-WAN with retail, but its ability to link a number of branches, while still promising exceptional application performance, is critical to operations. EE earned itself quite the network upgrade, as InfoVista continues to assert presence in the SD-WAN space.

With Hybrid or SD-WAN, optimization is just a deployment away…