Orange Business Services connects mining firm OceanaGold to Cisco's SD-WAN

Andrew Borthwick (Orange Business Services)

Orange Business Services (OBS) has connected mining giant OceanaGold to Cisco's SD-WAN network, ripping out its legacy multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) connections. 

The global enterprise division of the Orange Group used its Flexible SD-WAN offering, which is underpinned by Cisco Viptela, to boost OceanaGold’s digital transformation. 

The project stemmed from OceanaGold moving its applications to the cloud, and therefore needing a “secure and flexible way to connect to the internet”.  

The setup includes traffic routing and bandwidth allocation to improve the user experience for 2,000 employees. At the same time, the mining company can allocate internal resources away from WAN management to business-generating projects across its territories in Asia Pacific and North America. 

OBS also now manages the SD-WAN solution, which it claims makes it a single point of contact for services and technologies, as well as centralised billing. 

“Through partnering with a managed services provider, we achieved our key goals of gaining greater flexibility and improving the performance of our network to improve global connectivity throughout the organisation,” said Steve VandenBerg, head of digital technology at OceanaGold. 

 “Flexible SD-WAN has enabled us to do this, and we look forward to further collaboration with Orange as we accelerate our digital transformation.” 

Andrew Borthwick, managing director for Orange Business Services Australia and New Zealand, said the project had given the mining firm the desired blend of cost optimisation and bandwidth. 

“It has helped reshape their vision of us from a pure telecommunications vendor to a trusted digital services partner,” he said. “The new platform was co-constructed with OceanaGold’s team, from the solution design phase to the deployment to create a positive impact for their business.”