CRM Featured Article

Melbourne Kent Transport Industries, an Australian privately-owned removals and storage company, has chosen networks provider Uecomm to replace its existing frame-relay network with a metro-Ethernet WAN.

 

Kent's new CRM program and storage area network application will consist of more than 8,000 file transfers per day, Kent officials say, which will require fast and reliable access across the entire WAN. The increased bandwidth from the Uecomm product will also allow Kent to implement a records management system, letting the business transfer its hard copy documents to electronic copies.

 

The four-year $800,000 plus contract involves a fully managed router product and the delivery of 1:1 uncontested Ethernet services across Kent's entire WAN, consisting of its six regional offices, including ones in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra, as well as its major Sydney office and head office in Clayton, Melbourne.

 

A Uecomm fiber-optic network will be deployed between the two major offices in Melbourne and Sydney, with the regional offices connected via SHDSL, ADSL and E1 links, providing the business with an increased bandwidth of 16Mpbs, up from 2Mbps.

 

According to Kent Transport Industries IT manager, Craig Prestt, the motivation to upgrade to an Ethernet WAN was the business benefits that could be achieved with a more reliable, scalable service with greater capacity.

 

"We were looking for a network infrastructure product that would provide a higher quality of service across the WAN and that could also support voice, video and data intensive applications," Prestt explained, adding that "our existing frame-relay network simply didn't offer these benefits. Network additions were slow and costly and the capacity didn't allow us to take advantage of newer bandwidth-hungry applications."

 

The network design will also allow a failover at the head office in case of disaster. Kent plans to make its Sydney office a redundant site for its head office.

 

In February, Toyota Financial Services, an Australian financier, chose Uecomm to design and deliver an Ethernet VLAN to "optimize the resiliency of its existing infrastructure," according to company officials.

 

Toyota Financial Services wanted a single vendor who could offer an integrated and secure product to support its entire back-end suite of IT, Internet and VoIP technology.

 

"We could have gone through multiple vendors; one for our voice needs and one for our IT infrastructure," explained Mark Gosling, IT Manager of Toyota Financial Services. "Instead we chose one partner."