Last week, we proudly announced an expansion of our relationship with Kandy, a division of American Virtual Cloud Technologies, which has been growing since we began working with their team and technologies nearly seven years ago. During two of the most challenging years we’ve all been through, together we worked to completely transform the communication networks and applications of one of North America’s largest retailers, with over 5,000 stores across the US and Canada. The retailer’s IT was finding it impossible to manage a rising number of network events, given the nature of their fragmented combination of multiple, local telecom vendors, a mix of hardware from phones to PBX servers, combined with the growth of their broadly distributed footprint. They needed to solve fundamental real-time communications and IT network obstacles to improve customer experience and employee productivity, which we and Kandy took on as a very exciting challenge – completely replacing and transforming how this physical and digital retailer connected internally and externally, for the greatest productivity and happiest customers. The super high-quality, next generation, cloud-based multi-site communications network is now fully in place, consistently enhancing business processes, generating considerable cost savings and efficiency gains, while boosting customer satisfaction. Working closely with the retailer, we were able to consolidate disparate technologies, normalize traffic, and integrate technology that increased their overall customer experience. First, we enabled dual SD-WAN connections and MPLS/LTE backup at each store to increase reliability and resilience, which proved to be more cost effective than legacy methods. Second, we added ConnX Maestro Orchestrator, an AI-driven technology for automated, and zero-touch provisioning for both voice communications and network equipment management, was used to match the needs of each site. Third, Kandy Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions reinvented the customer communications and in-store experience, and helped grow the number of customers through a speedy transformation of pro sales processes and customer engagement improvements. “Kandy inspires creativity,” said Chuck Canton, President, Kandy. “Our partners, developers and customers are building world class applications, supported by our team’s ongoing commitment and support. ConnX has been a world-class partner from day one, and one of the largest consumers of our software and cloud- communications platform. Their seamless implementations of increasingly large and distributed private enterprise networks continues to deepen our relationship. Today, by rolling out this exciting industry solution that retailers are looking for, we bring even greater value together as the retail sector continues their digital transformation journey. The ConnX/Kandy solution drives better customer experience, lower total cost of ownership, and opens the door for ongoing creative and competitive advantages.” ConnX and Kandy migrated over 5,000 stores and 100,000 subscriber lines in one of the largest enterprise unified communications and SD-WAN deployments ever. In addition, the project was completed 10 months faster than originally contracted and 8 months ahead of schedule. The retailer’s CEO congratulated the partners by noting that their business would not have grown 11% over the course of the pandemic without the technology, and the speed with which it was deployed.
