When it comes to building modern day networking solution, there is a constant play between the legacy and new-gen IT infrastructure; businesses have to stand on the intersection and decide on bringing solutions. Legacy solutions have somewhat been managed into a complete sourcing equipment so unless you have equipment’s that directly come from the Assembly lines all the servers, storage and networking solutions inside every IT system can be considered as a legacy. The reason has been the growing iterations we see for both hardware and software solution that is making the current network design legacy based.  When it comes to applications that are consumer-centric or connected to internet they are patched or updated for security purposes an application just a few times in a month or weekly or daily. Hardware moves very slowly, making the situation grim for the businesses because every update will depend on the manufacturing cycle. We are going through some of the major new-gen industry solutions; the idea is to adopt the real-world examples of how the new IT products and services are making a difference in production each day. This will give you an understanding of how to move about when planning such a major change and what are the potholes you should avoid. We will have an opinion of industry experts, analysts, system consultants, and IT integrator.

SD-WAN management for network solutions

The business to be explored – Swisslog, a midsize company provider of automation technology solutions for health and logistics so for them the IT resource is very precious. In 2008, the company went looking for a vendor that could supplement the companies small IT staff and provide a highly reliable and complete network management service. The company had previously tried three different vendors who had unreliable services and often took a considerable amount of time to resolve various issues and sometimes as long as 10 hours.

Strategy to find solution provider – At that time several of the WAN vendors provided many of the similar technology. Swisslog’s goal was to find a company that could go beyond meeting the technical requirements. The companies demand was to partner so that it could rely on the implementation services and highest levels of the post-implementation support. Open systems had a very strong reputation of working where, it could cater to different requirements as it would partner with customers, and after extensive due diligence, the partnership between the Swisslog and Open System began.

Key Components in solution – One of the critical components of the services for Swisslog were reliable uptime, high security, 24*7*265 network monitoring across the global location. The need for solutions that involve the rapid, proactive resolution of various issues that will arise. The ability and willingness to adapt the involving requirements, the demand for a partner whose team was an extension of its own and that understood the complete business.

Describing the deployment of how long it took and if the complete process came as planned

Swisslog lacked sufficient WAN and security expertise on the staff so that the company required Open Systems to act as a complete guide through the implementation. Open Systems were initially tasked with reviewing the business requirements, perform interviews, analyze the technical requirements, and recommend the required solution.  Once Swisslog was satisfied with solution based on requirements the partners then worked together to make the complete transition for all different locations, the transition was from the previous vendor who had worked just for past four months. During the period of transition- Open System provided Swisslog with dedicated resources who took the complete ownership of the projects. Anytime there was an issue, Open Systems was able to address them within minutes and the main focus was that no single issue should lead to a negative impact on the business.  Based on the previous experience the experience fast exceeded expectations.  Open System has been complete partner and extension of Swisslog team with rarely couldn’t solve a  technical problem described. Swisslog is often able to reach Open Systems within 30 seconds, and the issue has been typically resolved within 10 to 20 minutes.

How Having a Managed SD-WAN is changing business experience:

1. Due diligence is a major challenge where vendor might be saying something else and giving something else. Businesses must speak to the existing customers, before selecting Open Systems, Swisslog contacted other companies that were part of the Open Systems customer to make sure that the vendor was delivering the required solution promised.

2. It’s hard to understand the business requirements for the technology, where there is limited in-house expertise in the technology. No matter how much you analyze your needs in terms of latency and speed, there is always certain guesswork associated with vendors. It means that the vendor should be able to react quickly when something that hasn’t been planned occurs, or the customer realizes that something is not working well.

3. Business expertise is important, sometime Swisslog assumed that they knew about a particular problem and how to solve it. However, after further analysis it turned out to be untrue. When you adopt a solution as one of your trusted partners, you need to listen to them.

Conclusion

Swisslog was able to reduce the WAN management staff from seven resources to only three, that doesn’t affect the continuous required staffing solution. There is no need to have a solution to 24*7*365 staffing in locations around the world. However, the real benefit for the business came from the other required management solution that includes monitoring, security and time required to resolve the issue with the company recently saw an overall increase in the SD-WAN uptime, that has translated to significant ROI. With reduced outages and improved services, the clients have always been pleased with the services of Swisslog.

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