This case study focuses on the experience of a panEuropean fashion retailer, Primark. The retailer has 200 high street stores across 10 European countries and prides itself on style and quality at low prices, so network efficiency and cost control within the business is fundamental. The deal was secured with the help of a Dublin based reseller partner, DNM.
The retail sector in general is very demanding of early return on investment and Primark had previously evaluated Cisco product to improve network efficiency but this was not considered cost effective. Replify was chosen mainly for the rapid return on investment and ease of deployment across the customers large network.
DNM are a trusted service provider to this retail group and have implemented a number of their solutions over time. They are convinced that the Replify solution has a strong resonance in such distributed companies.
“In the current economic climate companies need to perform better but they are very conscious of cost. “
“Our customer wanted better network performance but didn’t want to commit to more hardware and data centre costs to fix the problem. We were delighted to find Replify’s solution because the product works perfectly in a typical retailer environment – but it comes in at a very attractive pricepoint given the virtualised, allsoftware approach that Replify adopts. It’s win-win for the customer and the reseller.”
The solution accelerates several of this customer’s major applications (mostly CIFS and HTTP protocol based), two of which are custom Web applications including their important HTTP-based stock provisioning application. The stock application traditionally caused the most pain across all 200 stores. In the preparation of their new stores they generally have issues with bandwidth which restricts the speed of store set-up. When a major new flagship store was opened in Barcelona they used the Replify Client.
Within the first hour they were experiencing 92% WAN offload and they kept the stock provisioning application operating with optimum performance throughout the set-up. Although most of the communication links between stores and HQ are 512k, some are 256k and they can only rely on 100k being available to them. Replify became the difference between roaming audit and management staff being able to perform some applications in store and having to download and take with them only historic information.
This retail giant is expanding fast but its new outlets are often dependent on relatively limited WAN connections. “Data is being sent to and from the company’s central inventory systems in Dublin and branches across the world in real time. The company was facing a real data bottleneck due to slow connection speeds. Quite simply, that problem has been overcome using Replify to substantially reduce bandwidth traffic with our unique acceleration technology. This means that remote branch offices – in new overseas locations like Barcelona – get much more responsive services from the network and the data centre.
The Replify solution went in quickly and easily from day one.” The Primark spokesperson agrees.
“As far as I am concerned, software of the type that Replify provides that fixes pain-points that we face in our everyday business – is worth every penny.Our WAN was impeding the progress of the business and we fixed the problem by adopting this software. We’re rolling out Replify’s all software solution across our 200 stores. And the sooner the better.Our WAN traffic is reduced, our performance improved and we haven’t had to invest in any new kit. That’s a success story in my view.
Replify’s virtual appliance and client-side software, incorporating ICE (Intelligent Caching Engine) data reduction technology, is available to download for trial today.
Network managers can see for themselves the improvements that can be achieved through Replify’s solution by visiting; www.replify.com