ChannelVision Magazine

By Tara Seals We sat down with Ed Higgs, director of Global Service Delivery, and Mike Howell, manager of Global Infrastructure Engineering, at Rentokil Initial, the world’s leading com- mercial pest-control services provider and a leading commercial hygiene services provider. Its subsidiary Ambius, meanwhile, is a leading commercial provider of plants and scenting. Based in the UK, Rentokil has more than 1,800 local service teams across the world, covering 91 percent of global GDP in more than 90 of the world’s 100 largest cities across North America, Europe, the UK and Asia-Pacific. Operating in 70 countries, ap- proximately 90 percent of its revenues are derived outside of the UK. Needless to say, Rentokil’s IT and networking requirements are prodigious. It recently imple- mented an SD-WAN solution from VeloCloud. We decided to find out more about the com- pany’s experiences with the technology, to help guide channel partners in their consulting efforts. ChannelVision: What made you decide to switch to SD-WAN? What benefits were you hoping to reap? Howell: For Rentokil Initial there are many benefits in deploying SD-WAN. We had a number of challenges to address with our existing network architecture, particularly as we drive towards a more cloud-centric application architecture. The more we investigated, the more that it became clear that SD-WAN was well-positioned to help address most, if not all, of the challenges. The fundamental driver behind SD-WAN was a need to deliver low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity to cloud-delivered ser- vices and applications, with a management platform that allowed us to manage and deploy at scale. CV: Tell me a bit about the deployment: How many locations, and the pieces involved. What technologies were replaced? What unique re- quirements did you have as a company? Howell: We currently have SD-WAN deployed in over 130 locations across five Inside an SD-WAN Implementation M any enterprises are considering implementing SD-WAN as a way to reduce costs and improve connectivity. But making the transition from MPLS to SD-WAN requires careful planning to make sure that the transition is smooth, and that valuable data remains secure. Sitting down post- deployment with Rentokil Initial buyeres side Channel Vision | January - February, 2018 50

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