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Lightstream reduces company’s long-term expenses by designing customized cloud strategy

Leaning into our longstanding relationship with AWS, optimizes the environment, to secure a favorable agreement and ensure maximum cost savings

Business Challenges

For over 25 years, companies have relied on this global software development company for solutions to effectively manage quality events and processes. Users depend on them to save time, maximize efficiency, and reduce the occurrence of errors, through their Quality Management System and Manufacturing Excellence products. This organization needed an expert cloud services program perfectly tailored to fit its needs.

Overpaying for Services
Our client grew increasingly concerned it was overpaying for services under a prior agreement and missing out on strategic cost-saving opportunities.

Overwhelming Options
The company was faced with an overwhelming combination of services and applications to learn about and sort through for the best deal to fit its specific needs. It needed a plan with terms customized to its unique needs.

Need for Guidance
An expert in the space was needed to help gather data and calculate relevant and reliable forecasting models on future cloud usage needs.

The Lightstream Solution

Through Lightstream’s extensive expertise and longstanding relationship with cloud solutions partners, we were able to design our operations to better leverage AWS solutions and services, saving time and costs.

Extensive Expertise
Lightstream relied on its extensive expertise to gather data for their client. This helped the organization’s leaders, alongside Lightstream’s experts, decide on key services and terms that could optimize cloud costs. Lightstream also initiated an in-depth analysis of the company’s systems and technical operations. Data-driven figures were also used to better flesh out the essential resources, platforms and other tools it needed to efficiently operate its business.

Long-Term Projections
Lightstream prepared five-year projections, forecasting the company’s future compute and usage demands. The projections accounted for industry trends, the company’s growth plan and other variables. Lightstream processed this data and designed the most comprehensive and cost-effective plan for the company.

Reaching Full Potential
Lightstream discovered some areas of the company’s current solutions were not being used to their full potential or weren’t being used at all. Lightstream was able to better educate the team on the technology and ecosystem, which maximized future use.

Higher Discount Rate
Lightstream designed a plan with terms customized to the company’s needs, engaged available yet underutilized technology and negotiated better AWS EDP agreement terms with a higher discount rate.

Cost-Saving Consulting
The company asked Lightstream to source quotes from possible new solutions partners. Because of Lightstream’s expertise with cloud services EDPs, it confirmed the best outcome for the client’s unique circumstances would be to remain with Amazon Web Services. It encouraged the client to continue with its current ecosystem, ultimately saving time and money, had a switch occurred.

Business Outcomes

Steep Savings
Lightstream’s negotiation of more attractive EDP terms resulted in an increase in savings. This was possible because of Lightstream’s long standing relationship with AWS and their deep understanding of the client’s needs. Lightstream facilitated mutually beneficial negotiations.

Consistent Partnership
Instead of parting ways, AWS and the company entered a longer-term agreement, which in time, saves costs and increases efficiencies.

Leveraging Solutions
The company was able to design its operations to better leverage AWS solutions and services, saving time and costs.

Secure Long-Term Savings with Lightstream

If your company needs an expert to help analyze your business needs to create secure and interconnected cloud and network foundations, Lightstream is the partner of choice. With our in-depth industry expertise and longstanding relationships with some of the most innovative cloud solutions partners in the marketplace, we can make recommendations on next steps, contract terms and partnerships that save your organization time and costs. Contact us today to get started!

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Lightstream Helps a Large Restaurant Chain Fast Track Digitalization and Save Millions in AWS and Azure

Industry:  Retail

Managed Services for Network and Cloud Simplify Billing, Improve Bandwidth Speed and Reduce Costs

Business Challenge

Consumers have choices, especially when it comes to fast-casual dining. When people are considering restaurant options, they are looking for fast service, convenience and tasty food delivered with quality and excellence at an affordable price. And they won’t settle for less. Restaurant executives understand this. As a result, they continually strive to deliver high quality, innovative service to their customers, to stay ahead of the competition.

In today’s connected world, consumers increasingly browse menus online and place orders remotely. Restaurants need a high-performing voice and data network to accommodate these demands.

In 2015, Lightstream began working with an international fast casual restaurant chain to address several network challenges. At the time, the company had over 2,000 restaurants and was struggling with an expensive, complex telecommunications network. They were experiencing connectivity issues at the stores, and it was costing tens of thousands of dollars every month in wireless cost overruns.

Solution

When Lightstream first engaged, the team began with a thorough review of the company’s existing network infrastructure and service providers. Each store was configured with a primary connection for voice and data with a wireless 4G connection for backup, and the company used hundreds of different providers across the country.

At the restaurant level, the company’s network was designed for uninterrupted service. If the primary connection went down, service immediately switched over to the 4G network. The change happened seamlessly—users were oblivious to the failover, and service continued as usual. The network, however, was not monitored closely. The company often was unaware when a switchover occurred, and stores could operate on the 4G network for a long time, causing wireless costs to skyrocket.

Because the company had hundreds of different telecom providers, the finance organization was overwhelmed with invoices flowing in from across the organization from the various vendors. Consequently, sorting through invoices every month was time-consuming and inefficient, requiring painstaking research to ensure the billing was accurate.

To resolve these challenges, Lightstream consolidated the company’s entire telephony infrastructure, replacing them with lower cost, higher bandwidth connectivity options, and streamlined the number of providers. In addition, Lightstream added network monitoring and event management services, so that any network outages or anomalies and would be identified and resolved without any added burden on the company’s IT organization.

Since that initial engagement in 2015, the company has grown to 3,000 restaurants, and the organization’s infrastructure has evolved. Today, SD-WAN is deployed across the infrastructure, and the company has invested heavily in moving workloads to the cloud.

As the company has grown over the years and its needs have changed, Lightstream has expanded its relationship providing network monitoring, event management, telephony, field services (installation, cabling, and wiring) and cloud infrastructure optimization.

Business Outcomes

Reduced Costs / Increased Bandwidth

Working with Lightstream’s technical experts, the company consolidated its voice and data network, reducing the number of circuits and carriers and increasing bandwidth to the stores at the same time. This substantially simplified billing—reducing the number of monthly invoices from well over 100 down to one.  All of this has generated millions of dollars in cost savings.

Reduced Connectivity Problems / Improved Service Availability

In 2015, the company was struggling with excessive wireless overage charges. Lightstream’s Network Managed Services for network monitoring and event management helped solve those problems, improving service availability and reducing wireless overage costs by a factor of ten. Network Managed Services includes proactive monitoring and carrier management, managed services through the support of our 24/7 network operations center, dedicated customer service managers and optional field services.

Cloud Infrastructure Optimization

The company has invested heavily in the cloud.  Currently nearly half of its revenue comes through digital sales which depend on the cloud infrastructure.

In 2017, cloud costs accounted for about $150,000 annually. Today, due to the growth of digital sales, cloud costs have increased by a factor of more than 100.  To keep costs in check and to optimize cloud investments, the company utilizes Lightstream’s Cloud Managed Services to help them gauge monthly trends and capture billing anomalies within their environment. This helps them avoid wasteful spending accounting for nearly one million dollars annually in savings. Cloud Managed services helps clients manage the day-to-day administration and management of their cloud infrastructures with a flexible mix of consulting, integration and managed services.

Digital sales are expected to grow as consumers are demanding more digital access than ever before. As a result, the company continues to invest heavily in cloud and rely on services from Lightstream to help optimize cloud infrastructure costs, while delivering better user experiences for their customers.