Lewis Stores has completed the purchase of a number of Lucent wide area network products from SPS South Africa VAR PQ Africa. Included in the product set is the first Lucent Max 3060 Access Switch. According to Martin Mollentze, Service Delivery Manager of PQ Africa`s Outsource Division at Lewis Stores, these products form the sole link to every one of nearly 500 branches across Southern Africa, some in very remote areas.
`The Lucent solutions make sure we have full communication across a wide range of lines - from some archaic analogue ones through to advanced digital links,` he says.
Lucent`s MAX family of WAN access switches is aimed at the remote networking needs of service providers and enterprises. Each MAX switch is a total remote networking solution combining the functionality of a router, a terminal server, an ISDN switch and a frame relay concentrator. The Lucent MAX 4030s, 4060 and the new 3060 model purchased by Lewis are installed in Cape Town and are used to connect to all Lewis and Best Electric Branches around South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana and Swaziland. Software is sent to these branches daily while at night the branches send reconciliation information back to the central office. During the day the branches also perform credit verification on new applications by dialing the central office.
`The Lucent Pipeline Remote Access routers are used in the Best Electric Branches to connect to central and the various distribution warehouses,` says Mollentze. `The warehouses use MAX 1800`s to handle multiple branches connecting at once. We also use the pipelines for senior management to be able to connect to central from home as well as for the divisional offices around the country to connect to head office. Finally we use one MAX 1800 and the other MAX 3030 to handle incoming calls to the Windows NT network. These can be from the divisional offices, home users or auditors in the field who work from laptops and dial in using modems.` He says the need for the particular network environment came about in 1998 when the company rolled out its new "Instore System" to all the Lewis branches.
`We needed a way of communicating daily with the servers in these branches. The Lucent products gave us the best way of handling this. When we rolled out Best Electric, we found that installing ISDN pipelines in the branches enabled the staff to be able to do a stock enquiry at the warehouse and at the same time another staff member could be doing a credit verification to head office. In many ways we have had some unique requirements and the Lucent product set has been able to address these issues.`
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