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Optimising the retail WAN

Optimised branch connectivity drives ROI, says Brandon Rochat, territory sales manager, South Africa, Exinda Networks.


Johannesburg, 19 Jun 2012

Retail organisations across South Africa were early adopters of WAN technology, as business leaders realised the benefits of real-time information sharing across their national branch outlets. The availability of wired and wireless broadband connectivity served to enhance the availability of information to decision-makers and it empowered these companies to realise further savings by using their WANs for additional functions, such as training.

Yet, while broadband availability is a boon to retailers, they must manage their WANs efficiently to ensure revenue-generating applications always gain priority over less important ones.

"We can all empathise with a customer trying to purchase something with a credit or debit card, waiting for what seems like forever for the network to verify his credentials," says Brandon Rochat, territory sales manager, South Africa, Exinda Networks. "Without proper WAN management, this can become commonplace. Furthermore, if the network goes down for even one hour, the losses would be tremendous as more people move to cashless transactions.

"One of the first warning signs of potential WAN problems is usually store managers calling their IT departments and complaining about slow or non-working applications," says Rochat. "This includes the most critical applications for retailers, such as POS (point-of-sale), order applications and sales transactions."

He further warns that while most retail outlets, even small branches, have some form of service-level agreement (SLA) with their network providers, this does not guarantee application performance. Some of the large retail organisations may even have MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) networks that offer a simple form of quality of service, but this does not necessarily guarantee application performance and assurance for the end-users.

"A simple test retailers can perform to see if they have `application assurance` is to flood the store link with rouge data and see what impact it causes," explains Rochat. "A properly managed WAN will still transmit crucial information no matter what other data is being thrown at the link."

While broadband is readily available over large parts of the country, the last-mile connections to stores are generally low bandwidth links due to the high costs of connecting hundreds of stores. Additionally, the retailers` IT departments are sometimes unable and unaware of what is happening on the WAN.

"It all boils down to information," says Rochat. "How can network managers make decisions that guarantee application performance over the WAN, while controlling their costs, if they have no idea what data is running over them?

"Once you have the correct information, delivering on the guarantees of performance and reliability become simple."

The solution for retailers is to implement the tools that will allow them to understand the operations consuming their WAN bandwidth. Once they have this information, they must act on it immediately to ensure important data is given priority over less important programs vying for space on their WAN. Only after these two crucial functions have been initiated do they then introduce data caching and optimisation into the network.

Even retail organisations, with restricted bandwidth connections, using WAN management tools that allow them to follow these three steps can optimise their network traffic to make the most of what they have. They will be able to support critical transactions as well as aid additional traffic that may not directly impact revenue, but that still add value to the store`s operations. Ultimately, it is about the end-user and giving them a consistent and reliable application performance. After all, the store manager is the IT department`s end-customer.

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Exinda

Exinda is a proven global supplier of next-generation WAN optimisation and application acceleration products http://www1.exinda.com/ProductsOverview. The company has helped more than 2 500 organisations in over 80 countries worldwide improve the end-user experience, manage application performance, manage congestion over the WAN and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

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