We saw an opportunity to adopt a completely new network technology. Now, we’re Macquarie Telecom’s largest SD-WAN customer.
Peter Nelson, CIO, G8 Education
A small IT team easily simplifies network complexity with centralized visibility, remote troubleshooting, and a smaller hardware footprint.
Situation
G8 Education has seen a constantly growing demand from parents to receive realtime photo and video updates from their early education centres. As this trend continued, G8 Education realised their legacy networks weren’t equipped to provide these services, and to keep their childcare centres ahead of the competition.
Needy Networks
With a nationwide network spanning 500 centres, G8 Education Limited (ASX:GEM) leads the way in delivering high-quality, educational childcare facilities across Australia and Singapore. Focusing on childhood education management, they aim to make good centres great.
Choosing a childcare centre involves in-depth research and scrutiny. Parents are savvy buyers who shop around, armed with a multitude of questions including what sort of digital initiatives are in place. Digging deeper into the standard of care, they want to know if their kids will have access to the latest technology, and what digital capabilities put a centre ahead of the rest.
With a far-reaching network extending over 500 sites, and thousands of applications all running concurrently, lessening network congestion is paramount for G8 Education. Because legacy systems run on sluggish, outdated networks, they’re often choked. This is why balancing bandwidth across all sites is a driving force behind G8 Education’s switch to SD-WAN.
Open 6-to-6, five days a week, the centres vary in capacity, from 5 to 30 staff. Each resembling a small business, their technology demands aren’t immense, but essential to their smooth operation. Used for education, observations, regulatory compliance reports, and general communication with parents and support offices, staff need to know they can access the network whenever and wherever, from any device. Multiply this scenario by 500 sites, and the bigger picture emerges.
We saw an opportunity to adopt a completely new network technology. Now, we’re Macquarie Telecom’s largest SD-WAN customer, and once our national rollout is complete, we will be the largest SD-WAN implementation in Australia.
Peter Nelson, CIO, G8 Education
Solution
Better Technology. Better Care.
After global research and advice from technical advisors about the best SD-WAN platform currently available – Macquarie Telecom kept floating to the surface.
The fact is that premium internet services result in greater team engagement. This has a run-on effect: better participation with parents, and improved quality of service to the centres. Ultimately, this is better for families; better technology, better care. With less tech-pain points, it benefits staff too.
Multi-Path technology seamlessly merges multiple link connections, meaning remote sites which had snails-paced, unreliable connections now have faster speeds, more uptime and less frustration.
SD-WAN is driven by an easy-to-read online interface called the Orchestrator. This single-screen overview allows G8 Education network admins to monitor and prioritise how bandwidth is being used across each centre and give low precedence to apps that paralyse the network. This ultimately means that badlytimed software updates no longer get in the way of sharing daily video stories with parents.
Future-focused
Peter Nelson, CIO for G8 Education, believes that flying blind on data visibility and network bandwidth has been holding them back. With 500 sites comes 500 different connections, each throwing different network issues into the mix.
Macquarie Telecom’s SD-WAN, powered by VMware SD-WAN™, gives G8 Education increased visibility over what their bandwidth is doing, at both a site and network level. By taking the control back and bringing stability to the network, G8 Education can now focus on creating innovative ways to deliver education services to families and use technology to improve the customer journey.
With expansion on the cards, the plug-and-play flexibility of rolling out SD-WAN means deploying new sites is no longer a lengthy or expensive process. Once the Edge box is installed, with a few clicks, G8 Education can instantly and remotely configure the site, manage its bandwidth and update its policies.
Parent communication tool, Kindyhub, lets staff share photographs and post stories through the day so that parents can engage. The current mix of connections like ADSL, cable broadband and – in some of the more remote centres – cellular 4G, haven’t had the bandwidth to accommodate an upgrade to video stories.
SD-WAN simultaneously uses up to four access links, from NBN to ADSL – or even 4G, and stitches them together to create faster, more reliable connections. G8 Education can up the ante in nurturing parent, family and customer engagement. In the end, that’s what technology is all about.
More than monitoring bandwidth and reducing downtime, rolling out SD-WAN is about making G8 early education centres the best in the world.
Company Profile
G8 Education has seen a constantly growing demand from parents to receive realtime photo and video updates from their early education centres.
Industry: Education
Headquarters: Australia
Results
Macquarie Telecom SD-WAN has delivered a network that’s fast and reliable, to connect parents to their children seamlessly throughout the day. It’s given them easy control of their network too, from a single screen.
- Video, voice and photo sharing services don’t glitch or drop out: SD-WAN’s low latency surpasses every other WAN technology.
- Uptime has improved significantly: communication is no longer held back by frequent outages.
- Site rollouts and updates are now easy: there’s no need to send a technician to each site, which was time consuming and costly. Everything can be configured remotely.
- Controlling the network and monitoring its speed and uptime is simple and quick, through the SD-WAN Orchestrator.
See Also
“Big Technology for Little People”
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