Jan-Feb 2020 - ChannelVision Magazine

Health and safety issues: Imag- ine headquarters receives notice of a product recall and needs to halt lettuce from being distributed at 20 different locations. There’s no time, in this situ- ation, to manually call or visit each location. Alerts need to be immediately distributed from a centralized system, received and notarized. Without con- nectivity, it’s very difficult to ensure this takes place. Ultimately, a restaurant chain needs to act like a single unit. Indi- vidual franchises can’t go rogue and start doing whatever they want. Con- nectivity is the glue that keeps a string of restaurants working together – and when it stops, things can unravel very quickly. It can lead to major losses in revenue, unhappy customers and an- gry franchise owners. Fortunately, it’s getting easier for companies to manage their connectiv- ity and prevent downtime. In fact, com- panies today have more control than ever before. How SD-WAN fits During the last few decades, the food service industry – similar to most every other industry – has been under- going digital transformation. First, res- taurants started using computers and local area networks to manage internal operations. Then we saw wide area net- works (WANs), the internet and eventu- ally the cloud come into play. The latest iteration is SD-WAN, which enables restaurants to create robust WANs made up of multiple con- nections, from multiple carriers. Multapplied’s white-label SD-WAN solution, for example, essentially al- lows a company such as McDonalds to act as an internet or managed ser- vice provider. Multapplied can provide premium connectivity, as well as the freedom to deploy and manage it as needed – with no strings attached. A restaurant chain can use Multap- plied’s white label SD-WAN offering to: Control margins: Unlike third-party vendors, Multapplied grants customers complete control over distributing and monetizing connectivity. So a restaurant chains’ corporate headquar- ters, for instance, could charge indi- vidual franchises for connectivity – as much or as little as desired. Prevent downtime: SD-WAN technol- ogy is designed to route traffic over nu- merous circuits, and switch between them as needed. So if one link starts experienc- ing performance issues (such as dropped packets), traffic can be automatically sent over another. With this system in place, it’s possible to establish seamless failover, preventing individual branch locations from losing connectivity and eliminating the above-mentioned pain points. Control bandwidth: Restaurants will experience sudden spikes and lulls in traffic at various points of the day. Net- work administrators can use SD-WAN to apply quality of service on a global scale, ensuring business critical applications remain up and running as needed while also preventing bandwidth from being wasted during off-peak hours. o VIRTUAL REALITY 35 January - February, 2020 | CHANNEL VISION