Customer satisfaction is critical for all businesses, particularly when it comes to retail. To maintain high customer confidence, businesses are required to expand branch locations at scale, seamlessly adopt new technologies and offer uninterrupted online services with a better user experience. However, this can be challenging when retailers rely on legacy Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) connections backhauled through corporate Infrastructure.
Industry-leading automotive retailer, AutoNation, realized their current wide area network (WAN) architecture was complex, slow, and often unreliable as MPLS has failed to meet their performance demands – even after moving from T1 to higher-bandwidth fiber connections. To achieve high application performance, reliably and securely, they sought a highly available and cost-effective SD-WAN solution.
Digital Transformation to Elevate Efficiency and Future-Proof Investments
With more than 350 distributed locations and a workforce of 22,000 employees, this North American automotive retailer validated multiple networking vendors through a rigorous evaluation process. Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN’s cloud-delivered branch model (combined with the ability to integrate security tightly) proved to be the most cost-effective solution that could deliver improved application performance and Layer 7 granular visibility for AutoNation.
As a result, AutoNation reduced its time to deploy and bring up a branch location by 95%. The flexibility of automating change management after business hours removed operational interruption and planned network outages. AutoNation’s infrastructure team confidently moved forward with the deployment of next-generation SD-WAN from Palo Alto Networks across all branch locations.
A Next-Generation SD-WAN Approach to Reduce Costs, Improve Performance and Better Customer Satisfaction
With a cloud-delivered branch solution that was able to address all of the varied needs across its infrastructure, Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN was able to manage the following use cases for AutoNation:
- Deliver Best ROI: Replacing traditional MPLS with standard broadband connections reduced AutoNation’s OPEX costs by $3 million per year – up to 25% of their annual spending. Faster troubleshooting and resolution cycles with AIOps and machine learning-enabled analytics reduced support tickets by 99%.
- Seamless Deployment Roll-Out: Prisma SD-WAN zero-touch deployment allowed AutoNation to bring up their branch offices online in under thirty minutes – a 95% reduction in the time needed to deploy compared to their legacy MPLS routers.
- High Application Performance for Improved User Experience: Prisma SD-WAN provides Layer 7 visibility with application intelligence for traffic engineering that allows AutoNation to improve network performance and application experience, boosting customer confidence and revenue through retention.
- Consistent and Reliable Connectivity: Prisma SD-WAN offers high availability with dual devices that maintains connectivity to branch locations (even if an appliance fails) with fail-to-wire capability. AutoNation chose Prisma SD-WAN ION 3000 high-performance appliances with 500Mbps of throughput for their branch offices, providing consistent connectivity.
- Future-Proof Investments: AutoNation's move to Prisma SD-WAN enables their roadmap of moving to a self-service model for their customers that requires reliable, high-speed bandwidth in the most cost-effective way.
Adam Rasner, Vice President of Technology Operations at AutoNation said, “Without the network, there is nothing, and that’s why we took our decision to move to Prisma SD-WAN very seriously. With Prisma SD-WAN now we have the highest performing network we’ve ever had, just from the bandwidth change. It gives us the option to introduce more applications into the environment, which is a huge business enabler for us.”
Learn how AutoNation achieved high performance, improved bandwidth availability and reduced their OPEX at the best ROI with Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN.
Find out how Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN can help your organization achieve digital transformation with our free trial.