SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 11, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CloudGenix, the global leader in enterprise SD-WAN, today announced its partnership with Aaron's, Inc. (NYSE: AAN), a leading omnichannel provider of lease-purchase solutions, and its divisions Aaron's and Progressive Leasing, as the retail company continues its digital transformation. CloudGenix assists Aaron’s with cloud services and branch office connectivity.
Digital transformation supports 1,600 locations in the United States and Canada
With $3.9BN in LTM revenues and nearly two million customers, Aaron’s serves a large market through multiple channels and products. The Atlanta-area based specialty retailer has been in business since 1955 and supports roughly 10,000 employees.
The company’s technology team includes 250 people focused on support, infrastructure, and application development along with product management and user experience. The technology team is based in Kennesaw, GA with field technology employees assisting with store updates.
Deploying point-of-sale systems to 1,600 locations in 27 minutes
Aaron’s has adopted the CloudGenix CloudBlades® platform to deliver IT solutions to all the company’s 1,600 stores. The first step was to create a foundation with SD-WAN to centralize IT. Then the technology team adopted more cloud services for general productivity applications. The company migrated from on-premises Microsoft Exchange to Office 365 allowing stores to be online and connected to the network. As a result, the technology team is more nimble in providing a better user experience for employees and customers.
“With CloudGenix, not only are our applications and data moving to the cloud, but also our remote office infrastructure. We now have an app-centric view of the world and not a protocol sense of the world. We are becoming less and less beholden to hardware refresh cycles and burdensome integration,” said Aaron’s, Inc. Chief Information Officer John Trainor.
Today, the technology team can deploy point-of-sale systems to all 1,600 locations in 27 minutes, and with the CloudGenix analytics tools, the company’s technology team has greater visibility into daily operations.
“What takes other retailers many months, we do continuously. And, because of our centralized model conversion, we aggregate data from stores in real time. With analytics at our fingertips, we can better serve our stores. We truly have a modern development environment,” added Trainor.
In addition to providing better network performance, CloudGenix assisted the company with a smooth migration to VoIP. CloudGenix balanced the network and cloud infrastructure through bimodal IT, which eliminated a “boat anchor issue.” CloudGenix also helped the company achieve network parity with DevOps, support, monitoring and analytics through guidance on multi-cloud services and layer abstraction.
On January 24, 2020 in a press release, the TMC editorial team announced that Aaron’s won the 2020 SD-WAN Implementation Award. According to the editors, “The honor is reserved for the customers and vendors willing to push the envelope of performance, reliability and innovation.”
Trainor and his team plan to continue to partner with CloudGenix, implementing more of the CloudGenix CloudBlades® platform. CloudBlades securely delivers best-of-breed branch infrastructure from the cloud. With CloudBlades, network (SD-WAN), security, voice, multi-cloud access, and operational tools can be delivered without additional hardware or software. CloudBlades also supports Aaron’s desire for an API driven network infrastructure.
Trainor and the team point to the challenge of getting network performance right and he credits the CloudGenix partnership with empowering the infrastructure team: “CloudGenix helps put them in a lean-forward position vs. a lean-backward position. The level of engagement of CloudGenix is unmatched. The team, including the CEO, is easy to work with and responsive,” said Trainor.
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CloudGenix makes the Cloud-delivered Branch possible by providing an Autonomous SD-WANTM and the Cloud-BladesTM platform. Enterprises gain cloud-scale economics for the branch with the freedom to use any WAN, any cloud, and any best-of-breed infrastructure service. Founded in 2013 by a team that has delivered industry-leading products in networking, SDN, cloud, security and web-scale applications, CloudGenix serves world-class financial services, legal, retail and technology organizations.
Press inquiries:
Jin Woo
280blue, Inc.
jin@280blue.com
(510) 691-8862