Somerville invests $1.2M in new Cisco network

Osh Ranaweera (Somerville)

IT services provider Somerville has launched a $1.2 million national network upgrade using Cisco technologies to support its customers and connectivity demand in the market. 

The new network doubles Somerville’s capacity using Cisco’s Network Convergence System (NCS) router offering.

It features 100 and 400 Gigabit Ethernet capacities to cater for co-location requirements, high-capacity traffic volumes and better architecture for optimised handling of traffic. 

At the same time, customers will benefit from proactive incident reporting and network management propelled with quality of service- (QoS) based reporting for latency sensitive traffic.

“Our aim is to modernise our existing network and support customer solutions and application driven methodologies, while at the same time building customer resilience, delivering high availability and increasing our overall network capacity to 400 GB capability,” Somerville connect services manager Osh Ranaweera said. 

“The new network will provide a better customer experience by reducing the total time required to onboard customers while providing more visibility, comprehensive reporting and proactive detection of any potential security issues.

“At the same time, customers will also benefit from any upgrades which will now be software driven resulting in less margin for error.”

Somerville’s new national network has been designed to drive down total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimising outages with proactive alerting capabilities, providing faster transitioning requirements, scaling individual customer requirements and reducing potential risk while boosting overall security and automation.  

A key feature is the Cisco Evolved Programmable Network Manager (EPNM), which provides both service-driven customer deployments and telemetry enabling customers to gain better visibility into their network traffic and reporting. 

The network features multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) segment routing with bandwidth monitoring, long-term scalability and automation as well as a new converged software-defined network (SDN) transport architecture which provides a higher level of redundancy and scalability. 

Cisco commercial managing director Luke Power said the new network will provide the latest software innovation and system design as well as the required automation to secure and scale customers.

Last year, Somerville managing director, Craig Somerville discussed how the company was making changes to its internal operations. 

This included rolling out a new e-commerce platform, payroll system, going live with a HR people and culture platform, migrating its PSA platform from an on-prem to a cloud version and adopting a new marketing application.