How A1 Technologies helped JD Sports save thousands in WAN costs

About JD Sports

Known as the ‘King of Trainers’, JD Sports is a leading multi-channel retailer of the biggest and best global sports fashion brands across footwear and apparel. JD Sports opened their first physical stores in Australia in early 2017 and are continuing to open stores around the country with over 45 stores as of 2022. Read More About JD Sports

Technology Challenges

Since opening their first brick and mortar stores in Australia, JD Sports has experienced rapid growth and continue to open a significant number of new stores on an annual basis. However, with the rapid expansion came rapidly increasing connectivity and WAN costs.

“We had been with our previous vendor for several years so there was familiarity and history there, we were running a legacy private WAN environment, which was stable, but very expensive. We knew there had been advancements in the SD WAN space and wanted to explore them. Internet and connectivity appeared to be getting cheaper but our cost per site seemed to be ever increasing“

Mark Woodhouse

CFO, JD Sports Australia

In addition to the increasing WAN costs to service their new stores, JD were not getting the level of customer service they needed to support the agile and fast paced nature of their operations. Sites were often going down unexpectedly, services were being disconnected with limited warning, and communication response times were lagging.

The Solution

A1 Technologies conducted a comprehensive review of JD’s operations including their current technologies, commercial processes, and store requirements. Based on the review, A1 in conjunction with the team from Exclusive Networks were able to design and deploy a cutting-edge Fortinet SD-WAN solution which involved:

Decommissioning the aging and expensive MPLS network and bring the hosted firewall inhouse to increase flexibility and visibility.
Transitioning from expensive 10mb and 20mb fibre services to NBN 100/40 at retail stores and Fast Fibre at key locations such as the head office and warehouse.
Deploying FortiGate SD-WAN IPsec failover to ensure connectivity and redundancy.

The Benefits

JD Sports were able to realise a 40% reduction in their annual WAN costs while increasing network visibility, flexibility, and scalability. Operationally, JD now benefit from a more personal and responsive service from A1 Technologies. They can now focus less on managing their IT and focus their efforts on growing their business.

``When we looked at the numbers, we were able to save over $100,000 a year in data costs moving to an NBN/SD-WAN solution. The A1 Team have been incredibly professional and highly responsive.”

Mark Woodhouse

CFO, JD Sports Australia

``We focus on deploying solutions that deliver tangible value to our customers - the customers outcome is always the number one priority. The A1 Team and Exclusive Networks did a great job in designing a solution that improved JD’s technical capabilities and operations, while reducing costs.”

Rob Rattray

Sales Director, A1 Technologies

Need Help With Your SD-WAN solution?

Need a secure SD-WAN solution that will scale with your business? We can help design, build, and manage a robust and effective solution, just like we did for JD Sports. Get in touch today, we are here to help.