Intermarché: "Our stores are connected 24/7."

The challenge

Non-stop connectivity between our locations

Intermarché is a sub-brand of Les Mousquetaires, a French retailer operating in France, Belgium, Portugal and Poland. At the opening of each new supermarket in Belgium, it is crucial to establish a connection between the store itself and the administrative and logistics offices and data centres in France as soon as possible. Intermarché also needed a partner for a mobile and fixed telephone system solution. The independent managers running the stores were given the option to go for Orange for their fixed and mobile phone systems at a low rate. By choosing a simple partner for all data and network services, Intermarché now receives very competitive prices and optimal customer support.

The solution

Comfort that knows no boundaries

Intermarché chose the Orange fixed business solutions: a local IP/VPN solution on the SDSL network. "For every new store we open, Orange succeeds in keeping the installation and configuration time for the network connections as brief as possible," Sorin Iancu, IT Manager at Les Mousquetaires, says. The stores, administrative and logistics offices and data centres in France have all been connected since mid-2010. The connection is centrally managed. "The xDSL connection will now be the primary connection, but we will keep the satellite connections as a backup to still make optimal use of that investment as well." The Les Mousquetaires group also decided to plug the payment terminals into the AtoS Corporate Gateway solution via the Orange backbone.

"When we moved our data centres in late 2016, Orange Belgium worked with its international partners to continue to ensure connectivity," Sorin Iancu emphasises. "Orange continued to invest in even better network reliability and availability since we renewed our contract."

The result

Maximum response

"The Orange range of complementary services is just perfect for us," Sorin Iancu says. "Particularly the permanent network availability and quality support, which is also proactive to prevent any possible problems, are excellent. We are also very pleased with the direct, sincere contact with our Account Manager, Vincent Streignard."

Intermarché is planning to increase the data network’s capacity. "We currently have 1Mbit/s, but we have noticed that the data volume is increasing significantly. We also developed a number of commercial apps that require more capacity between the stores and our data centres. Until recently, we mainly planned the peaks in data traffic at night, but we noticed that the nights were getting too short and vital network connections were suffering," the IT Manager adds. "At the end of 2016, we investigated whether the network still met the requirements and we found that 5 to 10% of stores could start to experience problems. However, by the end of 2017 these will be resolved. Orange is now working on a proposal that will allow us to push up the VDSL bandwidth to 30 Mbit/s. Implementation is planned in 2018."