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Corporate Communications

The Challenge

A nationwide retail organisation with outlets in almost every high street needed to update their existing networked point of sale (PoS) and business data system to run over a private national network, while at the same time keeping their data secure and without incurring the costs of downtime. The end-customer has over 300 sites across the UK and nine remote sites in Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland and the Channel Islands.

The primary concern was the complexity of large scale deployment of CPE appliances required for network connectivity to a diverse geography with minimum downtime and minimum implementation costs to the end customer.

The Solution

Working closely with the ISP’s MPLS core engineers, the Virtual Access customer support team helped to integrate the CPE appliance services with the MPLS network. Together with Corporate Communications, Virtual Access designed end customer service profiles for Virtual Access appliances at the edges of the network.

Using Virtual Access’ Zero Touch managed installation process to deploy over 300 networked sites across the UK meant that no engineer or specialist installer was required on site to install the CPE appliance technology. This in turn simplified the logistics operation and minimised the costs of service implementation.

The Benefits

Why Corporate Communications felt the Virtual Access solution was a good fit for this project:

‘This being a large retail operation, communication resilience was a pre-requiste for Chip and PIN credit card authentication. This required a fixed link with back-up in the event of the primary link failing. We found that the Virtual Access product was ideal for this as it provided cost-effective use of the ADSL PSTN circuit for back-up.’
Raj Dave, Corporate Communications.

The top differentiators of the Virtual Access solution:

• The product’s capability and ease of deployment across a large estate.
• Zero Touch managed installation service provisioning meant there was no need for highly qualified engineers for installation and commisioning, allowing fast and cost-effective roll-out.

Direct benefits to the end customer

• A highly resilient cost-effective network.
• Ease of maintenance and support with Corporate Communications being able to provide remote management.

End customer benefits of the overall solution

• The business benefit is lower cost of deployment support.
• The technical benefit is that it delivers the required solution resilience.

Further business benefits to Corporate Communications

• The major business benefit to Corporate Communications is that they are delivering the required solution to their customers, providing remote management and on-going support.