High-End Retail Improves Customer Experience Upgrading WAN Network Performance Across 350 Locations


This chain of high-end department stores opened its first location in 1901. It is now an omnichannel retailer with 350 stores in North America and online customers in 96 countries. In an enterprise-wide initiative to create the best possible customer experience through continuous innovation, the network team researched software-defined networking, eventually settling on Cisco’s Intelligent WAN to power their corporate network. IWAN offered the flexibility and economy of SD-WAN, while simultaneously reducing network costs. As the team prepared to roll out IWAN across 350 retail locations, it became apparent that they required a platform to simplify and automate the process of configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting the solution for this large-scale deployment.


The networking team selected LiveNX, the application-aware network performance management platform from LiveAction. As the Cisco-recommended management solution for IWAN, LiveNX leverages the collective network-performance management experience found at LiveAction, a considerable asset that is baked into the platform. As a result, tight integration between LiveNX and IWAN provides operational efficiency while mitigating risk. Even with teams that have varied levels of experience, live and online training assures that all members can effectively use the solution.


The single-pane-of-glass capabilities of LiveNX provided the rich visualization the retailer needed for an issue-free rollout. Different views allowed them to validate traffic path configuration and performance across all sites, ensure that the traffic loads were balanced, monitor the network for alerts by site pairs, application groups, and service providers, and quickly identify and resolve anomalies.