The Brief
Clarks, as a major high street retailer, has 20 large locations across the globe supporting sales, sourcing, design and logistics.
The global WAN was due for replacement and the internal project team required assistance to gather the business and technical requirements for its replacement. Increased performance, ease of maintenance and support were key drivers as were the support for business strategies such as the adoption of Cloud services.
The requirement was to:
- Capture the business and technical requirements in order to develop a WAN Network Strategy and Bandwidth Modelling Tool;
- Analyse the current network to identify requirements for the new WAN Service and to discover root cause of any performance issues;
- Provide technical evaluation of the RFP responses and help refine the technical requirements for the Best and Final Offer Stage of the RFP process.
Our Process
FarrPoint worked closely with the internal project team to complete a number of activities following a structured process of requirements capture through to final strategy presentation:
- Workshops were held with business representatives to capture technical and business requirements;
- Analysis was completed of the current WAN and Application Performance Monitoring was carried out over a six week period;
- The WAN Network Strategy was produced taking into consideration the current and future technology trends such WAN Optimisation and Cloud etc.;
- A bandwidth-modelling tool was developed to help classify locations and assess the amount of bandwidth required;
- Technical requirements for the new WAN infrastructure were documented for use in the tender process;
- Assessment of the RFP technical responses to aid supplier selection.
Results
The company has now completed the procurement process and successfully selected a preferred WAN supplier.
The network analysis was invaluable in identifying performance issues which could be addressed by the new WAN and through additional short-term actions.
The Bandwidth tool allowed more accurate sizing of the location bandwidth to be completed and along with the implementation of WAN Optimisers where appropriate, will ensure the network can support all required applications.
