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Queensgate Shopping Centre

This case study highlights our consistent ability to meet our client’s specific needs and solve their pain points. We deliver a high level of technical expertise to the retail industry with carefully designed bespoke and cost-effective solutions. In this case, we mobilised switches, managed the network and deployed technology focused on the client’s needs over a three-year period.

July 2022 • 5 min read

OUR CLIENT

Queensgate

Queensgate shopping centre, located in the city of Peterborough, contains over 100 stores and 2300 car park spaces. The shopping centre has a diverse range of tenants including food vendors, independent businesses, big-name retailers, and more. They host regular events for their various visitor demographics, which result in community experiences and increased footfall. In 2015, £30 million was invested into the Queensgate refurbishment project, which included an extension as well as a new network of Cisco technology. Managing the diverse needs of this client and each tenant brings layers of complexity that our team understands from their years of retail industry experience.

Queensgate shopping centre logo

The challenges

Cisco networks
Queensgate shopping centre was previously owned by Hammerson who had installed the Cisco network. This highly technical network had more features than necessary for its purpose at the shopping centre. Cisco is more suited for high-level or high-enterprise units, which wasn’t appropriate for Queensgate. They required something designed perfectly for their needs, with full support and replacement switches on demand so there’s no major downtime.

Expenditure
Queensgate was determined to reduce its services bill. With Cisco, they were paying an annual bill for the smart network to maintain their warranty. Queensgate’s switches also required replacing after meeting their end of life and they wanted to ensure they were going for the right switches before repurchasing them.

What Queensgate required
Queensgate required a resilient solution that was tailored around what they use day to day to prevent unnecessary expenditure. They needed technical retail experts to drive these changes smoothly so to avoid downtime for tenants and shoppers.

ITVET’s solution

ITVET swapped Cisco for HP Aruba Fibre. There isn’t a perfectly equivalent product that is the same as Cisco, so we designed a bespoke network for Queensgate with HP technology.

The benefits of HP for retail

  • Huge cost savings
    ITVET’s solution cost 40% less than Cisco, providing a huge saving for Queensgate. We designed an HP network that was future resilient and fit for purpose, with all the features Queensgate needed.
  • Lifetime warranty
    The HP comes with a lifetime warranty which is essentially 30 years. If a switch dies, Queensgate has hot spares to reduce downtime.
  • Removal of ongoing costs
    With HP, you pay for the capital whereas Cisco requires ongoing smart network recurring charges.

A perfectly planned process

This process has been planned over a three year phase to spread out the costs of swapping out the Cisco infrastructure.

  • Year one
    The two primary switches are replaced.
  • Year two
    Half the edge switches are replaced.
  • Year three
    The other edge switches are replaced.

Full IT support and expertise

At ITVET, we go above and beyond what’s expected in the retail sector when it comes to support:

  • 24/7 monitoring of systems.
  • Regular penetration testing – This ensures Queensgate’s network is up to the level it needs to be to reduce the chances of malicious attacks. If any weaknesses are identified, we fix them.
  • A human voice ready to help – Our IT support team is truly accessible. Queensgate can always speak to a real person when they raise a support request. Being trained to a much higher technical standard than is expected within our industry our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line engineers resolve even complex, strategic service requests quickly and efficiently.
  • Retail industry experts – We provide managed services to over 350 shopping centres across the UK. We have our own in-house retail analytics software, Retail Report, that transforms retail management.

The professional, knowledge, and service provided by ITVET really is second to none. Always calm and willing to help and go the extra mile. I cannot thank you all enough for the support and help.’

Network Administrator

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