The Tile Shop, a ceramic tile retailer with 120 stores across the U.S., adopted networking technology from Citrix to bring digital shopping experience at its store.
Tile Shop implemented Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN with Citrix XenDesktop. This enabled accelerated access to internal business applications from every store, increase bandwidth to create consistent access to apps needed daily at a lower cost and significantly reduce latency.
The key objective of The Tile Shop is to help customers understand the variety of products that are offered, assist in designing a customer’s dream space, and utilize technologies such as the new Design Studio software, which allows customers to create a virtual project space to see what their tile renovation would look like. With the addition of the Citrix solutions, The Tile Shop is able to achieve all of these goals.
Emergent Networks, a Minneapolis-based IT advisory firm and Citrix Platinum channel partner, advised The Tile Shop IT team to adopt a solution that would improve network speed for all the branches, and offer ease-of-use and connection redundancy.
More than 90 stores have since been shifted to the digital networking architecture and virtualization solution to date with deployment averaging approximately 30 minutes per store.
The Tile Shop expects a solid return on investment within 16-20 months of implementation.
Though wholesale bandwidth prices continue to vary by geography and by carrier, an SD-WAN architecture is actually much less expensive versus traditional WAN approaches that rely on dedicated MPLS circuits.
The new architecture has also improved network uptime by moving branch traffic to the corporate data center which aggregates multiple different internet connections and helps route traffic much faster, while also safeguarding each location from being cut-off from the network entirely.
