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“As a tech leader, I have to look at the latest and greatest proven tech available. SD‑WAN has not been around a long time, but with the benefits I’m seeing, I am 100% confident it was the right solution.”
– Neal Cung, CTO / CIO at LSO

According to Aberdeen Group, unplanned network outages cost businesses on average $260K per hour. For many enterprises, an outage means total business disruption – and more and more are finding that a software‑defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) offers the best protection available.

That’s the case with Windstream Enterprise customer LSO, the largest regional parcel carrier in the southern United States. Based in Texas, LSO competes with national shipping companies in seven states by promising customers the speed of a courier, the discipline of a carrier, and the service of a true partner. The company’s 1,000 employees deliver thousands of packages every day with one of the industry’s best on-time records. The single biggest threat to LSO’s on-time delivery? Network downtime.

In 2016, LSO acquired a similar regional carrier headquartered in Tennessee. Knitting the two headquarters and 60 business locations caused the downtime threat to spike. Legacy MPLS networking over T1 connections became fraught with increasing outages, and when data-center connections went down, the business’s operational integrity went down with it.

LSO engaged Windstream Enterprise to address this by implementing SD-WAN Concierge^™ as an overlay across all locations, with dual-access connections to ensure maximum uptime. A new, secondary network/data colocation facility ensures that if the Austin facility goes down, the system remains online and business continues without interruption. LSO is now planning to build upon its SD-WAN platform with business‑enhancing services to include Windstream Enterprise UCaaS and CCaaS solutions.

It’s a success story reflecting the gains made by the smooth migration to SD-WAN, and all those who are responsible for this feat. Customer advocacy is deeply rooted into every area of our business here at Windstream Enterprise. As VP of Customer Experience, Maria Marino, eloquently describes in her post, our collective mantra is to ‘solve for customer success’.  At Windstream Enterprise, this begins with those who are responsible for engineering the architecture and design of our networks, and continues with those who directly support our customers on a daily basis.

None the less, it would behoove me to recognize the unwavering commitment of those whose roles are dedicated to this very effort —our customer advocate teams. The pride these individuals take in the opportunity they have each day to communicate on behalf of our customers and work cross-functionally with the talent at Windstream Enterprise to ensure our solutions are delivered to their specific needs, is something that truly sets our organization apart.

If your own business needs a solution for up to 100% uptime, or is looking to improve application performance, download the complete case study to see how Windstream Enterprise helped LSO overcome their challenges. CTO/CIO Neal Cung’s perspective gets to the heart of the matter: proceeding with confidence in SD-WAN’s many unique advantages over legacy networks.

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