Credit: Dreamstime
Nexon Asia Pacific has completed a major networking overhaul for Australian men’s fashion chain Lowes as part of a $4.5 million project.
The Sydney-based cloud and managed IT service provider upgraded and refreshed the 120-year-old company’s networking hardware, standardising its Cisco and Meraki routers.
The project is one part of a $4.5 million, multi‐year managed services contract that Lowes signed with Nexon in July 2018.
The networking refresh began with an audit of Lowes IT environment, which found significant security and business risks posed by its ageing hardware and heterogeneous network infrastructure.
The full upgrade then took place across a number of pilot sites in late 2018, with the full deployment recommencing in February 2019, a project funded from Nexon’s managed service contract.
“By incorporating the network and hardware upgrade as an operational expense under the managed services agreement, Lowes was able to undertake a massive refresh project like this without any upfront capital outlay, which would have been close to $1 million in hardware costs alone,” Nexon’s client engagement lead Nevien Badawi, said.
Lowes has been a customer of Nexon’s for roughly 15 years and signed the $4.5-million in July 2018, extending the relationship by a further four years.
The latest agreement also encompasses the migration of more than 200 Lowes stores from ADSL to the NBN broadband access network as the service is rolled out across Australia.
The provision of 24/7 managed support for Lowes’ IT environment, including head office and store network, cloud telephony, centralised security and cloud infrastructure, are all also part of the deal.
According to Nexon, the majority of Lowes’ stores have been migrated to NBN services already, with minimal or no disruption to operations.
Four years ago, Nexon also migrated the majority of Lowes’ on‐premises server infrastructure and services to its own private cloud.
“Like many of our peers in the retail sector, Lowes is facing the challenges of dealing with digital disruption," Lowes IT manager Geoff Paine said. “With Nexon’s help, we are now planning to introduce new technologies to improve the customer omni‐channel experience and create analytics on consumer behaviour in-store, as well as upgrading and developing better integrations between our back-end systems.”
Nexon also recently announced a $5.6 million multi‐year contract with Craveable Brands, also deploying Cisco Meraki, and a three-year agreement with Toymate to transition its head office and stores to NBN and manage its network and telephony services.
