Retail Business Owners: Are You Focusing on What You Do Best?

Are you running a retail business? Or are you running around managing the infrastructure that supports it? As we all know, sometimes it feels like the business is running you.

As a retail business owner, you may be missing out on opportunities for growth because your IT resources cannot keep up. If your IT operations are frequently impacted by downtime, you need to begin to invest in infrastructure management. You need an infrastructure that runs smoothly in the background, allowing you to focus on what you do best – running your business.

Here’s an actual story of how one retailer managed to rapidly grow their business by leveraging Optanix’s managed IT services. The retailer was also able to reduce their IT overhead by eliminating overlapping toolsets and consolidating their IT infrastructure management under the Optanix Platform.

The customer in this case was a major specialty retailer operating multiple brands throughout North America. With thousands of retail stores to support, reliable network connectivity was essential. Any network downtime directly affected in-store sales and the bottom line.

The retailer managed its network internally with an IT team of 10 people. The small team constantly struggled to provide remote support for the widely-distributed network of stores.

The company was growing rapidly and had just acquired a major new retail brand. To compound the IT team’s workload, the new acquisition was experiencing network outages that were disrupting store transactions.

The growth of the business at this critical stage depended on the IT team’s ability to rapidly stabilize the infrastructure for the new acquisition without interrupting the support and service of the existing infrastructure. With limited internal resources, the company turned to Optanix for a solution.

Initially, the company chose Optanix’s IT Management-as-a-Service (ITMaaS) to manage only the infrastructure for its newly acquired business. Optanix’s ITMaaS is based on the use of the very same Optanix Platform that provides industry-leading management of IT infrastructures.

Optanix’s managed IT service delivered immediate value to the company.

The Optanix Platform deployed quickly. It immediately identified preexisting network circuit issues that were disrupting store transactions. Optanix engineers then worked with the company’s carriers to resolve these issues, creating stable and reliable connectivity to each store.

The Optanix Platform’s ability to reduce event noise, resolve issues before they affect end users and provide effective remote support services resulted in orders of magnitude improvement in network availability.

As Optanix demonstrated its value, the retailer expanded Optanix’s monitoring and managed services to cover each of its other national brands.

Optanix’s ability to scale its engagement model and platform was a key enabler for this expansion.

Along the way, various other benefits were realized. The Optanix Platform provided such a cohesive and comprehensive set of capabilities that the company was able to stop using a whole slew of standalone legacy systems. This reduced the total cost of managing the infrastructure.

Further, the commonality of the functionality provided across all stores enabled the company to create and maintain a consistent run book that covered all its retail brands. To this day, this ensures uniform processes and rapid resolution to network outages.

Read the “Optanix Ensures Network Availability for Major National Retailer” case study for the full story.