Australia Post has selected Comscentre as its new managed service provider, responsible for managing network upgrades and connectivity for the next five years.
Australian-owned Comscentre, a managed service provider specialising in enterprise managed network and collaboration solutions, will work with Australia Post to complete the network connectivity.
The project will leverage Cisco Meraki SD-WAN infrastructure, and it will also transition network connectivity across 4000 metro, regional, and remote sites across the country.
“We are pleased to have Comscentre on board to help take our customer service and experience to a new level. Comscentre demonstrated a clear understanding of our vision for the future, and we look forward to expanding our capability with their expertise,” comments Australia Post chief information officer John Cox.
According to Comscentre, Australia Post was looking for a partner that could offer superior service delivery with a flexible, innovative and proven approach to transition and transformation.
As the market embraces new technologies such as SD-WAN and the NBN, traditional legacy carriers with large sunk investments in ageing networks are experiencing declining returns, making it difficult for them to expand on or even support their current infrastructure,” says Comscentre executive director Cameron Quilty.
“The result is reduced investment, resilience and increased outages. What has historically been a carrier's greatest asset has become their greatest future liability with recent staff cuts across the country in the Telco sector testament to the challenges they face.
“In contrast, Comscentre is uniquely positioned to run and manage multi-vendor, best-of-breed network ecosystems and services within a market facing intense pressure to maintain quality of service under rapidly changing conditions and competitive pressure.
Comscentre attracted Australia Post's attention thanks to its internally developed network management platform called One Touch Control.
“One Touch Control (OTC). OTC has the unique ability to amalgamate multi-vendor and carrier connectivity into a single dashboard that monitors and reports on network performance, hardware health, carrier SLAs and best practice business processes,” the company states.
The platform will provide Australia Post with a single pane of glass view of the entire network ecosystem as it continues with international expansion and the rollout of new services to a broader market.
“The successful engagement with Australia Post endorses our approach. By leveraging the Australian government's $50 billion investment in the nbn network, Cisco Meraki SD-WAN and OTC, Comscentre will provide Australia Post a managed, multi carrier network while supporting a fleet of 15,000+ devices across 4,000+ locations,” concludes Quilty.
Comscentre has previously partnered with Brisbane-based RIoT Solutions to design and roll out Cisco Meraki SD-WAN for Flight Centre Limited back in 2015.
The project included the transformation of 1,100 retail sites nationally and was completed within a nine-month project timeframe. Comscentre went on to manage the multi carrier environment leveraging OTC as the underlying platform to drive greater visibility of network utilisation, carrier performance and hardware monitoring via a single dashboard approach.