Sustainable Retailer Colruyt Gears up for Growth

To keep customers coming back, Colruyt must provide quality goods and convenient services at competitive prices. Ensuring the smooth operation of mission-critical applications and the technological infrastructure that underpin its customer-facing services is key to retaining happy and loyal customers. That’s why Colruyt is always looking for new ways to enhance its business infrastructure.

“Everything from the central back-end infrastructure supporting our e-commerce sites to the distributed point-of-sale systems and tablets used by our staff, as well as CCTV cameras, are all connected to our WAN,” says Wim Derijnck, team manager, network solutions at Colruyt. “If we were to experience any issues such as high latency, reduced responsiveness, or limited throughput, our customer service could be negatively impacted directly.”

“After deploying the SRX5400 next-generation firewall, we are now well on the way to upgrading our network bandwidth to 40 Gbps. The combined power of cuttingedge firewalls, routers, and switches from Juniper Networks will strengthen our overall network reliability and flexibility” says Derijnck.

Once it has deployed the EX3400 switches, Colruyt expects to see dramatic improvements in throughput, preparing the company for increases in network traffic caused by continuing business growth.

“After deploying the SRX5400 next-generation firewall, we are now well on the way to upgrading our network bandwidth to 40 Gbps,” Derijnck says. “The combined power of cutting-edge firewalls, routers, and switches from Juniper Networks will strengthen our overall network reliability and flexibility. Also, Juniper Networks’ EX Series switches and QFX Series data center switches give us the ability to add new nodes into our network quickly. With this extensible configuration, we will be able to meet any future peaks in traffic caused by further growth or seasonal shopping periods.”

By redesigning the architecture of its network switches and routers, Colruyt anticipates fewer and less severe disruptions to the core applications used by staff in its stores.

“Our latest work with Juniper is helping us to simplify and enhance our network,” Lefevre says. “We are gaining greater flexibility, robustness, and smarter network management capabilities without compromising on overall performance or adding complexity. Thanks to the smart stacking capabilities provided by the Virtual Chassis solutions, our in-store POS and tablet devices will be significantly less likely to go offline if a stack encounters issues, ensuring a smoother, more responsive experience for customers.”