Retailers, SD-WAN and its Best Practices

We're going to start off looking at some research on Unified Communications (UC). Ribbon conducted a study earlier this year, and we've carved out results from the retail vertical. We thought it might be interesting for all of you to look at what some of your peers in the retail industry are talking about or thinking about when they're thinking about Unified Communications (UC). Then we're going to ask our friends from Atlas to talk about a joint project that we've been working on with a very large retailer (5,000+ stores) upgrading both there WAN and voice infrastructure. Lastly, we'll cover the lessons that we've learned from that in terms of best practices for SDN WAN and voice system implementation.

Let's talk a little bit about research, back in Spring of this year we conducted an online survey of 4800 decision-makers for technology purchases for their companies in 27 countries. The respondents ranged from decision-makers in very small companies (SMBs), to those with well over a 1000 employees. We asked them a lot of questions about their infrastructure, who they buying voice and internet services from and how are they managing IT, how do they view technology adoption in their in their companies and so on.... Finally, we asked them about their voice infrastructure and we wanted to understand which of these companies had adopted Unified Communications (UC) and who hadn't. We also ask questions about Microsoft Teams, SD-WAN, SIP Security, and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS)

The first thing we looked at here was IP adoption. This is voice over IP adoption by vertical. So this could be either companies that have moved to a IP PBX or a move to a hosted PBX or UCaaS service, some cloud-based phone service. 36% on average of these companies have moved to or have adopted IP Communications. So in other words, roughly 64% have yet to adopt IP Communications and I think it's interesting that as we look at retail and hospitality and food and beverage industries, they're actually lagging the overall market in terms of adoption. Most of these verticals have yet to move into IP, either haven't quite seen the value yet or haven't really pulled the trigger on it on a buying decision here. Roughly 70% that have not adopted, 25% of those are still using Key Systems or very older antiquated phone systems at each store. So not a lot of Technology movement in these segments. And again, this is looking at five +100 employee site businesses. So these verticals are actually trailing the overall market trends.

The next thing I want to look out for these adopters of retail what is most important to them? Well, first, Mobile integration was seen as important to the overall Market, but not quite as important to the Retailers, The things that were seen as important to the Retailers were things like Contact Centers, they wanted lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), and they wanted a single provider. The next thing here with the adopters and what was seen as important in the buying process versus what's important to their business today. First was CRM integration and being able to integrate their customer database into their communications environment. Group Features, which can be as simple as hunt groups and things of that sort to more advanced group features, like a store employee might be able to be integrated within a call center. Lastly, Google tool integration, a lot of retailers are using Google to run their business and some want the ability to integrate their voice systems with Google was seen as an important element.

The next thing we're going to talk about is WAN adoption. So again, this this is a corporate WAN and a large percentage of these businesses have some sort of WAN infrastructure generally using MPLS. The average of these segments is around 83% but food and beverage is actually trending higher, retail trending a little bit lower than the overall market average relative to WAN adoption. However, for those that have deployed SD WAN satisfactions is very high. The biggest things that customers have told us are are important or have been a big benefit to their deployment war WAN efficiency, better performance for their Cloud applications and for accessing Cloud applications like thier CRM or Unified Communications.