Company Profile:

Apple Growth Partners are specialists and CPAs with backgrounds in accounting, finance, law, business management, and technology. While serving clients in numerous industries, they have expertise in serving clients in manufacturing + distribution, professional service firms, construction, real estate and affordable housing. With 6 locations throughout Ohio and growing, Apple Growth was growing by acquiring CPA firms in the region and needed a way to rapidly integrate these firms.

Challenges:

• Lead times for dedicated services were prohibitively long.
• Quickly onboarding new offices into IT infrastructure.
• Redundancy and complexity challenges with existing network.
• Limited IT staffing.

Results:

• Substantial increase in network visibility, management and Quality of Service.
• Reduction in time to deploy into and integrate new locations.
• Leveraging WAN Dynamics team of skilled engineers to take over network responsibilities.

Growing by acquisition can at times be a harrowing proposition. The IT team at Apple Growth Partners was faced with the challenge to integrate many new offices as they acquired them not to mention keeping pace with managing the existing network infrastructure. WAN Dynamics was engaged to deploy a fully redundant VeloCloud based SD-WAN solution to provide greater flexibility, visibility and uptime to the network and extending the IT resources of the team with the engineering resources at WAN Dynamics. As more of the accounting applications were moving to the cloud, Apple Growth also found a lot of value in moving to a "cloud first" connectivity model, converting their expensive MPLS links to Dedicated Internet Access Links giving them better connectivity back to the resource which were now becoming SaaS applications.

Using its existing MPLS network, Apple Growth was having problems scaling the network to meet demand. Deploying new locations took upwards of 90-120 days and once deployed the redundancy strategy was maintained with complex dynamic routing policy. 



Solution Selection & Implementation: WAN Dynamics and VeloCloud

Apple Growth understood that in order to continue servicing its customers and integrating new locations with the options available, it needed to move to a more dynamic and scalable technology platform. Apple Growth engaged WAN Dynamics, a leading provider of helping businesses effectively leverage new and next generation enterprise technologies such as SD-WAN, cloud applications, SDN solutions, and cloud-first voice and data communication integrations, to eliminate dependence on the existing MPLS and adopt a SD-WAN strategy. In turn, WAN Dynamics partnered with VeloCloud, the leader in SD-WAN, to architect and deploy a corporate-wide network transition.

With WAN Dynamics and the VeloCloud SD-WAN solution, Apple Growth was able migrate its entire network to a more performant and resilient SD-WAN deployment.

Now using the VeloCloud Orchestrator for centralized management, troubleshooting, and provisioning, VeloCloud Gateways for secure, reliable, performance access to cloud applications to and from all remote sites, and VeloCloud Edges deployed at each customer premises, Apple Growth Partners had a true cloud implementation that supported its current and future initiatives to deliver exceptional care to its residents.



Hours to a New Site Deployment

Prior to SD-WAN, the addition of a newly acquired site to the corporate network often took far too long due to the need to initiate and install a new circuit and router. In addition, the new circuit was limited compared to broadband options that were available.

With SD-WAN, a new site could be rolled out in as little as 3 to 5 days, with the bulk of that time spent on obtaining the line from a carrier. With a line established, the implementation itself would take only hours. With no circuit limitations, WAN Dynamics could roll out three new sites within a day.


Visibility: Problem Identification and Resolution

Using the VeloCloud Orchestrator, both WAN Dynamics and Apple Growth Partners were able to eliminate the need for multiple user interfaces to manage various components of the network and gained visibility across the entire network and into each customer site. The Orchestrator would identify network issues, create alerts for those activities that required immediate action, and allowed for remote remediation. Prior to SD-WAN, this was not possible, with problem identification and remediation occurring on a per site basis, requiring expensive truck rolls.



High Cost vs. High-Quality

With the traditional WAN, running a circuit to geographically dispersed sites was expensive to install and to manage. With per location costs reaching $10,000 to $12,000 for dedicated business internet network connectivity construction or $38,000 for a dedicated fiber line, bringing each facility into the core network is cost prohibitive for most organizations. However, SD-WAN from WAN Dynamics can utilize inexpensive broadband links and its inherent capabilities optimizes the delivery of traffic across any available transport system. WAN Dynamics was able to purchase inexpensive circuits from carriers, integrate them into the VeloCloud SD-WAN platform and with intelligence built into each touchpoint on the network, deliver the same or better high-quality video, voice, and data to each facility in the network.

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WAN Dynamics was established to help businesses effectively leverage now-generation and next-generation enterprise networking technologies, including SD-WAN, cloud applications and services, SaaS applications, Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions, and cloud-first voice and data communication integrations.
For more information, visit WAN Dynamics at www.wandynamics.com and follow the company on Twitter @WANDynamics.

VeloCloud Networks, the Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN company, Gartner Cool Vendor 2016 and a winner of Best Startup of Interop, simplifies branch WAN networking by automating deployment and improving performance over private, broadband Internet and LTE links for today’s distributed enterprises.

For more information, visit VeloCloud at www.velocloud.com and follow the company on Twitter @Velocloud.