Case Study: How City Beach reduced outages across its store network

Retail surf brand City Beach needed a new reliable SD-WAN network across its stores as it experienced several dropouts during major retail events.

Rhian Greenway, CIO at City Beach said the organisation had been a Macquarie Telecom partner for the previous nine years before implementing the solution.

He explained, “We weren't interested at that point in going to market, we had a lot of contracts that all had different end dates and was a bit of a mess. We looked at what solutions we could get through Macquarie and the Juniper Mist solution and became their new go to market for what we were already doing.

“We replaced the Meraki infrastructure that we had countrywide. So that was access points, security advices, the whole collection and then we also looked at our warehouse and replaced the legacy of Aruba set up there with the Juniper Mist equipment that Macquarie can provide as well.

“For us, not having stability in that network meant outages to point of sale itself, it could be an outage to the EFTPOS network, all things that have a negative impact on customer experience. By putting a solid foundation in and making sure that it ticked all the boxes for security, redundancy, ease of use, all those things has allowed us to worry about that environmental a bit less than we had historically,” he said.

Since implementing the new Macquarie Telecom solution, Greenway said City Beach have had less outages.

He said, “It's hard to quantify the exact impact of an outage, we always look at lost sales as a direct metric to an outage. But it's always hard to know whether that's real or not, [but] we traded through peak a lot smoother this year.”

One of the challenges during the rollout was the time it took for the implementation to happen.

“The time it took to roll it out is probably the biggest challenge for us, we knew he had a problem, we wanted to fix it as quick as possible and sometimes you can't move as quickly on those things as you'd like to,” he said.

“It probably took longer for the rollout we would have liked and we did approach it fairly aggressively, even going into the early stages of peak to make sure that we wouldn't have to worry about it to mix the state over that peak period.”