UCC Coffee awakens its business with Interactive’s SD-WAN
Media release: UCC Coffee, ANZ, retires its legacy MPLS network
30Mbps to 500Mbps for less
UCC Coffee, Australia and New Zealand, has awakened its entire ANZ business by retiring its legacy MPLS network.
Known for housing Australasia’s most loved coffee brands such as Robert Harris, Toby’s Estate, L’affare and Mocopan, UCC Coffee spans eight sites, including two production and distribution centres in Melbourne and Auckland. With an average of 40 people per site vying for bandwidth, the roasters turned to Interactive to transform its network from MPLS to managed SD-WAN. After its acquisition in early 2022, UCC Coffee needed to guarantee that it could continue to grow and give its hybrid workforce what they need to succeed.
UCC Coffee’s IT Manager ANZ, Greg Wratt said, “Teams calls became the bane of our people’s lives. Our staff would have to hotspot from their phones or choose to work from home just to avoid network congestion and be able to do their jobs effectively. Now, it’s a whole different story. Our new managed SD-WAN network with Interactive has awakened everything”.
Interactive’s Network Services provides managed SD-WAN solutions giving customers greater control and management over their networks by dynamically routing and prioritising network traffic according to the specific needs of each application. Critically, Interactive’s solution breaks the glass ceiling for organisations looking for more ownership over their networks by removing the shackles put on by big telcos dominating the market.
“Interactive’s networks service is far superior to any provider I’ve experienced in my 25+ years in IT. It has also been considerably more cost effective for us. At one site we went from 30Mbps to 500Mps, and it costs us less. We saved 25% off our overall network costs which enabled us to bring two more sites under the one network. This is music to the ears of my boss and our CFO. Our people are also much happier to come into the office now that they have uninterrupted connection with each other”, shared Wratt.
Interactive engages selected partners in Australia and New Zealand to get the best outcome for their customers, including nbn™, Cisco, Fortinet, Vocus and Encoo Communications. This streamlines the entire process and ensures customers get the best value and experience in the market.
Interactive’s team has made this entire project a breeze. They are an incredible team of experts who know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve provided a hassle-free delivery ahead of schedule, making my life stress-free during a major transformation project - Greg Wratt, IT Manager, UCC Coffee ANZ
As a business nbn™ accredited adviser, Interactive advises customers on the acquisition and support of business nbn™ technologies through its extensive network of retail service provider partnerships. These technologies include business nbn™ Enterprise Ethernet, business nbn™ Satellite Service, nbn™, business nbn™ Ethernet Traffic Classes (TC1, TC2, TC4), and more.
The business nbn™ fibre initiative gives eligible businesses like UCC Coffee the benefit of wholesale pricing discounts and enables regional areas to receive the same metro pricing that typically favoured capital city centres.
Reflecting on the changes in the network services market and the role of managed service providers that deliver end-to-end solutions for customers, Interactive’s Network Expert, Andrew Robson, said “nbn and enterprise solutions are acting as a leveling force on the carriage market. It’s no longer a race to the bottom of carriage pricing, it’s now a focus on the value managed services bring when wrapped across the entire technology stack. “
Gartner’s latest SASE report predicts that by 2025 50% of new software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) purchases will be part of a single-vendor Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, up from just 10% in 2022. As this trend rises, businesses are looking for one vendor to solve for both their networking and security needs. Using a single vendor for SD-WAN and security (SASE) allows businesses to achieve better integration of services, as well as to optimise costs and have a single point of contact for both network and security issues.
Robson said, “This is a logical lateral expansion into software defined networks – rationalised, application aware bandwidth, native cloud integration and SASE. Only a trusted technology partner like Interactive that provides end-to-end technology solutions is positioned to solve for this problem”.
Interactive is a technology solutions provider for more than thousands of Australian organisations. The team provides a suite of services such as network services, cyber security, multi-cloud, data centres, business continuity and hardware maintenance.
Find out more about Interactive’s Managed SD-WAN services
Media contact
Aoife Garvan
Communications Manager, Interactive
