At A Glance
- Company
Maplewave
- Industry
Software as a Service
- Region
Americas
In its 30 years of existence, Canada’s Maplewave has never stopped innovating and evolving, solidifying its position as the premier SaaS provider of retail optimization services for the teleco industry. At Maplewave, innovation looks like every employee supporting the company’s core competency: software development. For IT leadership, that means freeing up IT staff time to help push DevOps to the next level.
Challenges
- Mundane network tasks throttled IT innovation
- Hours spent troubleshooting network issues
- Improper wireless network for workplace mobility
Outcomes
- Fully-redundant wireless network drives collaboration
- Freed IT time to drive business cloud goals
- SLA-driven, always-on, enterprise-grade network
NaaS is the right service after moving to the cloud
By moving its large server presence to the cloud, Maplewave reclaimed hundreds of hours in IT productivity. So when the time came for a network revamp, the IT team jumped at the chance to reap similar gains by implementing a Network as a Service (NaaS) solution.
“After seeing the benefits of the cloud, moving the network to Nile was a no brainer,” explains Maplewave Technical Support Analyst, Robert Loveless.
“The NaaS model takes the day-to-day network support off our plate, allowing our IT team to drive value, ultimately becoming more essential to the business.”
Maplewave scrapped its multi-vendor network in favor of Nile, which now supports 150 Halifax HQ users. Loveless couldn’t be happier and credits the change with improved company-wide collaboration, spurring IT innovation and making the network easier to manage than ever.
The NaaS model takes the day-to-day network support off our plate, allowing our IT team to drive value, ultimately becoming more essential to the business.
The way we work has changed
Collaboration goes hand-in-hand with innovation, which is why Maplewave employees aren’t tethered to specific desks. They connect wirelessly to the network, allowing them the flexibility to work with their colleagues anywhere in the office.
But it wasn’t always this way. Prior to Nile, Maplewave’s network wasn’t setup for true workplace mobility, it was missing the redundancy required for high-availability. If an AP went out, wi-fi in an entire section of the office was down. The switch to Nile’s fully-redundant, always-on wireless network jump started collaboration for Maplewave.
“Our employees come into the office and just plunk themselves down anywhere,” says Loveless. “They can’t waste time dealing with network connection issues, the wi-fi has to work everywhere, every time.”
Thanks to Nile’s network performance service level agreements (SLAs), losing productivity is not an issue. Employees enjoy guaranteed availability, capacity and coverage that allows them to roam and work from anywhere.
Nile connects users to the network based on their identity, providing a level of security that follows the user across the network versus traditional VLAN geographic limitations. So, while workplace mobility is celebrated at Maplewave, Nile’s architecture protects against social engineering attacks with 802.1X and MAB authentication.
A whole new way of networking: simplicity in everything
The Nile experience started with an install that was so quick and easy, Loveless characterized it as exhilarating. “At one point, we just walked up to the AP, scanned the QR, clicked activate and watched the AP light turn green. It doesn’t get any easier than that.”
The Nile network itself has been so reliable that Loveless doesn’t use the customer portal for tracking network performance. “I’ve literally never clicked on the SLA tile. Why would I? The network just works,” he explains.
Brian LeBlanc, Maplewave’s director of ITS, sums up the value of Nile perfectly: “Because we have Nile, I don’t have to worry about network performance.”
The portal is very useful though for troubleshooting devices outside of the Nile network and for security.
“Before Nile, we didn’t know who was connecting to the network,” Loveless says. “It’s been a huge security boost to control access by having that information in real time.”
Before Nile, we didn’t know who was connecting to the network, it’s been a huge security boost to control access by having that information in real time.
True NaaS includes troubleshooting
Before Nile, the Maplewave IT team would spend hours trying to pinpoint and resolve network issues. Today, the network continuously delivers always-on, high-definition connectivity and takes care of any software updates and security patches – the holy grail for an IT manager.
“Nile truly is ‘network as a service’,” says Loveless. “If there is a network issue, Nile takes care of it.”
If there is a network issue, Nile takes care of it.
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