Growth through acquisition is a common strategy, but once the acquisition closes, the labor-intensive integration of often very disparate systems and networks begins. This process should be transparent to customers and employees alike and allow business to run without interruption and impact to revenues. But it’s not an easy process and its made even more difficult if the integrating companies have large legacy networks in place.
This case study discusses All Holdings, Inc. (AHI) and the challenge it faced in integrating two disparate networks belonging to its two organizations, All Tile and Carpet Cushions & Supplies.
The Problem
All Holdings, Inc. (AHI) is growing in scale and expanding its footprint in the United Sates. Given the challenge of merging All Tile and Carpet Cushions & Supplies, the organization was under pressure to integrate each individual company’s networks and platforms, speed time to market, and consider an infrastructure that would allow it to scale to meet growing customer needs.
With 25 locations including its headquarters, and a desire to grow that number, AHI knew that its reliance on the legacy network would impede its ability to achieve this corporate goal and put a significant burden on the IT team. Additionally, the two organizations needed to combine platforms and infrastructures to eliminate unneeded redundancy. For example, each organization had its own ERP system, residing in different locations. Servers were located at various locations, requiring a lot of unnecessary network traversal to transmit data. The goal was to combine the ERP systems and data centers, and co-locate all servers into a single facility to simplify all maintenance and transmission requirements.
Common issues with the legacy network included reliance on a costly MPLS that offered a maximum 3Mbps connection speed. With only a single connection at each office, outages were a regular occurrence, impeding the company’s ability to do business. The lack of real-time visibility into network activity or application performance was a significant source of frustration.
MPLS was causing significant impediments to AHI business operations, limiting access to cloud applications and was creating a bottleneck in the ability to rapidly open new branches. MPLS requires dedicated lines to be run to the given location and the time to install it was around three months. The time to have those lines operational and integrated with the rest of the organization was not scalable. Additionally, it offered no failover which was potentially dangerous if any part of the network went down, which it often did.
To merge the two business platforms and prepare for any future expansion, AHI began to explore solutions that would help to meet network goals and provide a dynamic, agile, and flexible infrastructure. Solution criteria included:
Ease of implementation
Redundancy for business continuity
Interconnect all branches and a central datacenter
Complete the network integration in a 60 to 90 day time period
Coevolve, an independent provider of managed SD-WAN solutions and consulting services, was engaged to help AHI achieve its integration and collective network goals. Coevolve turned to VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN, which included full access to all VeloCloud Gateways, VeloCloud Edges at each branch office for the connection to the cloud, and the VeloCloud Orchestrator for full network visibility and centralized management.
Using Coevolve and VeloCloud SD-WAN, AHI was able to achieve the following results.
Enabling shift to cloud applications and services
Quickly deploy branches wherever, whenever
Complete network and application visibility
Secure credit card transactions
Ability to quickly implement service changes
Significant cost savings – several hundred thousand dollars per year
To read the details on how these results were accomplished, view the full case study today.
Growth through acquisition is a common strategy, but once the acquisition closes, the labor-intensive integration of often very disparate systems and networks begins. This process should be transparent to customers and employees alike and allow business to run without interruption and impact to revenues. But it’s not an easy process and its made even more difficult if the integrating companies have large legacy networks in place.
