KinderCare is America’s largest provider of early education programs. With more than 1,400 locations spanning more than 40 states, KinderCare serves 185,000-plus families in its programs every day. The company operates neighborhood childcare centers, corporate-sponsored centers for employee childcare, and before- and after-school care programs.
The Challenge
KinderCare has a large distributed network that was managed by a partner but lacked visibility into its own network as the partner did not share this information. Availability of the network was also very spotty and service levels needed significant improvement. Finally, the cost of the service they were paying for was in excess of what other companies were paying.
The Solution
KinderCare chose QOS Networks as its partner of choice due to the very large implementations it had led and were differentiated in that it was doing a lot of integrations to make things easier for KinderCare to use the solution.
QOS Networks has a strong relationship with the VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud team and leads with its solution. VMware SD-WAN checked off several of the criteria that KinderCare had in mind. The ability to co-manage the solution with a partner: check. Improve availability: check. Control of the traffic and visibility
While the SD-WAN platform is definitely important, Baker says the partner they chose is even more important. “We went with a managed service from QOS,” he says. “They operate our network day to day, so if a problem arises, they deal with it for us. They talk to the access providers if we have circuit issues, and they’ve built a failover design using cellular service that has changed our availability significantly.”
A Partnership with real results
KinderCare was able to significantly reduce its access aggregators and purchase direct from the circuit providers because QOS took over managing the support aspect. Leveraging direct relationships saved KinderCare significant money and provided preferential treatment in addressing issues or new implementations.
“…we want to have visibility and understand what is going on. We don’t want another black box situation. We want to hold our partner accountable but still be involved in the engineering decisions. With VMware SD-WAN and QOS, we found that option and it works really well for us.” – Dennis Baker, VP, IT Operations and Architecture with KinderCare.
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