Terry Pullin The High Street adopts MPLS to cut costs
The High Street adopts MPLS to cut costs
The importance of MPLS to Retail business
I don’t think anyone could deny retail businesses are in challenging times. I don’t pretend to have the answer to their upcoming challenges to generate more revenues; however through experience with working with some of the country’s biggest names in retail, I know how they are changing IT to make it more profitable.
A big challenge for multi-site businesses whatever their industry is with centralisation of IT and how to connect to it. For retail businesses, points of sale, varied working hours, security and uptime create additional challenges in the network.
Traditionally a high amount of application processes have been done “in-store” by retail businesses to avoid potential network issues of centralised infrastructure.
Over the last few years with the emergence of innovative virtual network operators, retail organisations have been able to take a different approach to network strategy utilising MPLS technology to deliver fast, secure 24/7 network connectivity across their WAN allowing efficient cost effective centralisation of IT infrastructure.
Different retailers present different challenges
Retail businesses have to go and look for locations where their target customers will come to them, getting connectivity to some of these locations provides challenges to network providers.
One of Backbone Connect’s largest customers provides services to the farming industry and almost all of its locations are at remote farms in the countryside. Installing leased lines and diverse DSL backup services to these locations presents a serious challenge.
Another customer, one of the UK’s leading jewellery retailers has a huge hourly transactional turnover and downtime in working hours is not an option so all circuits need pre-testing and out of hours switch over.
What are common for both these examples is the cost benefits these businesses realise from a centralised IT infrastructure. Both solutions with their challenging project deployments are much more expensive that individual internet access at each site, however the increased productivity of centralised IT systems far outweighs the cost of the network.
While we are talking about cost we also work with retailers who work to tight margins and although they have to find the benefits of centralised IT, they also need to make the network as cost effective as possible.
One of the largest auto services businesses in the UK have on such challenge. A vast spread of auto-centres combined with big offices of sales, operations and management staff drives a need for a combination of low cost but effective DSL services to be mixed with high bandwidth, high availability fibre circuits.
It’s no surprise retailers choose Backbone Connect
We rarely find an industry for whom the requirement for creative wide area networks is more relevant that the retail sector.
Undoubtedly the trend for “on-line” causes business challenges for people who make their money from high-street sales. However the technology which drives the consumers to “buy on-line” presents an opportunity for retailers to leverage networks to increase their shop front profits.
With the ability to deliver creative solutions and with understanding and references from some of the UK’s largest retail businesses, it’s no surprise that Backbone Connect is chosen network provider of many successful retailers.
For more information or to talk through your network challenges feel free to contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or at 0844 984 1717
