The Bay Club is a leading hospitality provider in California, offering outstanding golf, tennis, swimming, fitness and food services. Its 26 family-focused clubs span from the San Francisco Bay Area in the north to Los Angeles and San Diego in the south.
“As we grow, network cost of ownership becomes increasingly critical,” said Mark Street, IT Director at The Bay Club. “When it comes to our goals of reducing cost of ownership, accelerating expansion and integration, and delivering a high-quality member experience, VeloCloud enables us to achieve them all.”
The Bay Club has expanded rapidly through acquisition, doubling its size in 2015, and it expects to double again by 2017. With this pace of growth, The Bay Club faces a number of challenges, including integrating new clubs, continuing its signature club experience and service, and centralizing management. After testing a number of solutions, only VeloCloud SD-WAN offered the low touch, configurability, and flexibility that meet The Bay Club’s connectivity requirements.
“Even though our IT team has extensive experience in networking and applications, without centralized management we would need three times the current headcount to manage all of our branches’ needs,” Street said. “Now, VeloCloud is at the center of all new Layer 3 links in our network, giving us redundancy and availability without the cost of additional links. With extensive hybrid MPLS and cable connections, we are delighted that all links are used effectively.”
VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN enables enterprises to support application growth, network agility and simplified branch implementations while delivering optimized access to cloud services, private datacenters and enterprise applications. Global service providers are able to increase revenue, deliver advanced services and increase flexibility by delivering elastic transport, performance for cloud applications, and integrated advanced services all via a zero-touch deployment model. Both enterprises and service providers benefit from the multi-tenant cloud gateway architecture and the ability to support real-time applications over ordinary broadband links.
The real tests came when The Bay Club purchased locations that had only DSL connections to the Internet. Using VeloCloud in the production network, the team was able to get the sites up and running and deliver member services immediately. “We also added a cable connection at that location,” Street said. “When the DSL link went down, we saw the magic of VeloCloud. The new site never went down.”
“We are pleased to have helped The Bay Club operations and save them significant time and money,” said Michael Wood, VeloCloud VP of Marketing. “This is a great example of how VeloCloud enables quality of experience oriented for organizations to be unhindered by connectivity delays, poor link quality or exorbitant WAN costs.”