Credit: Dreamstime
Interactive has migrated Australian and New Zealand coffee house UCC Coffee to a managed SD-WAN and retired its MPLS network.
The global IT service provider was tasked with helping UCC gain faster and more reliable connectivity to its hybrid workforce.
UCC Coffee has brands such as Toby’s Estate, Atomic, Robert Harris, L’affare and Mocopan. In the past, it faced challenges such as congestion issues that were impacting productivity across eight sites, including two production and distribution centres in Melbourne and Auckland.
To help solve these issues, Interactive’s Network Services provided a solution for UCC Coffee to offer greater control and management by dynamically routing and prioritising network traffic according to the specific needs of each application.
With an average of 40 people per site vying for bandwidth, the roasters turned to Interactive to transform its network from MPLS to managed SD-WAN.
Following an acquisition in early 2022, UCC Coffee needed to guarantee that it could continue to grow and give its hybrid workforce what it needed to succeed.
“Teams calls became the bane of our people’s lives," UCC Coffee’s IT Manager ANZ, Greg Wratt said. "Our staff would have to hotspot from their phones or choose to work from home just to avoid network congestion and be able to do their jobs effectively. Now, it’s a whole different story. Our new managed SD-WAN network with Interactive has awakened everything."
Interactive’s Network Services provides managed SD-WAN solutions giving customers control and management over their networks by routing and prioritising network traffic according to the specific needs of each application.
Interactive works with partners in Australia and New Zealand including NBN, Cisco, Fortinet, Vocus, and Encoo Communications.
“Interactive’s networks service is far superior to any provider I’ve experienced in my 25+ years in IT. It has also been considerably more cost-effective for us. At one site we went from 30Mbps to 500Mps, and it costs us less,” Wratt said. “We saved 25 per cent off our overall network costs which enabled us to bring two more sites under the one network."
As a result of the implementation, UCC Coffee has achieved a more cost-effective network solution and streamlined its entire process.
As a business NBN accredited adviser, Interactive advises customers on the acquisition and support of business NBN technologies through its extensive network of retail service provider partnerships. These technologies include business NBN Enterprise Ethernet, Satellite Service, Ethernet Traffic Classes (TC1, TC2, TC4), and more.
The business NBN fibre initiative gives eligible businesses like UCC Coffee benefits such as wholesale pricing discounts and enables regional areas to receive the same metro pricing that typically favoured capital city centres.
“NBN and enterprise solutions are acting as a levelling force on the carriage market. It’s no longer a race to the bottom of carriage pricing, it’s now a focus on the value managed services bring when wrapped across the entire technology stack,” Interactive Network expert, Andrew Robson said.
Recently, Interactive ramped up its cyber expertise with the acquisition of Perth-based Slipstream Cyber Security.
