SD-WAN Case Study

This customer owned 15 auto dealerships across the southeast, all of which have been family-owned and operated since the ’70s.

The Challenge

This automotive group depends on a fast, reliable, and secure network to connect with customers, employees, business partners, while supporting key business applications across it’s dispersed locations. All of the company’s business-critical applications are located in a private, cloud-based system, including it’s CRM, inventory management, and servicing platforms. Employees depend on reliable access to the system to execute daily business functions and deliver superior customer service. Additionally, the automotive group provides guest WiFi for customers across all of its 15 locations, which also requires a reliable internet connection. While the growth of these dealerships was, of course, a positive, the higher volumes of clientele were straining the internet bandwidth. Slow network performance during high-traffic periods delayed productivity and, in turn, negatively impacted the customer experience.

The automotive chain was utilizing a 100 megabit per second (Mbps) Ethernet Network Service (ENS) line to connect its 15 locations to the cloud-based dealer management system. The automotive group also had a 200 Mbps Ethernet Dedicated Internet (EDI) lines in place at key campuses to support communication with customers and partners, as well as to power guest WiFi. The combination of the ENS and EDI lines delivered a robust connection that met the company’s needs for several years, but as the automotive group continued to expand, it began to experience network congestion. As the dealership added more locations and staff, the growing number of users put added pressure on the network and accessing the company’s cloud-based system became increasingly challenging. At the same time, the dealership was adopting additional cloud-based applications to which employees needed reliable access, further compounding the issue. Delays in system access negatively impacted the customer experience, as employees were unable to service clients quickly, and impeded employee productivity which produced frustration and complaints from workers across the network. Employees’ inability to seamlessly access the dealership’s business systems began impacting customer relationships.