Solving Retail Connectivity Problems with Cisco Meraki and ROCTEL at Your Side

Internet connectivity is vital for every business, but for retail, it’s becoming a top priority. Reliable, robust, secure internet is essential for retailers to overcome some of the challenges of operating in a business that relies on connectivity for processing payments and managing multiple locations. If you can’t take payment from a customer, you’re losing sales.

At ROCTEL, we aren’t a Managed Service Provider (MSP) only for retailers, but it is an exciting space to talk about. ROCTEL emerged to fill the gap between enterprise-scale problems and the major carriers, making our name on integrations and connectivity services. As the market evolved, we developed an "as-a-service" model to deliver a turnkey solution to our customers to solve and manage connectivity.

As our company grew, our team noticed some common challenges with our retail customers.

One of the big obstacles we found was that there was no uniformity. Franchise owners built out certain solutions, and ultimately the big brand behind them didn't necessarily have a playbook for them.

This left some significant gaps in connectivity and security. Working in distributed environments only magnified the challenge. We developed the blueprint so that retailers get a tech solution that works right out of the gate. It’s easy to understand and offers a low price point backed by exceptional service and rock-solid technology.

We partnered with Cisco early on in our journey. At the time, Cisco was a young company too, and we liked that the two companies mirrored each other in their ethos and perspectives on technology. ROCTEL’s as-a-service model dovetailed nicely with the development of Cisco Meraki and Cisco Umbrella. These Cisco solutions address some of the big problems for large enterprises in Ireland and beyond by enabling multiple access methods, Wi-Fi, analytics, and cybersecurity—all wrapped in a managed services package.

ROCSOLID Retail Solutions

Research from ITIC shows that an hour of downtime now costs more than $300,000 an hour for 91% of small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprise companies. Overall, 44% of companies reported that an hour of downtime would exceed $1 million in losses, according to ITIC’s latest 2022 Global Server Hardware Security survey. While smaller companies may experience lower losses, they still add up over time.

This is especially critical in Ireland, where many payments are now largely cashless. A cashless transaction requires 100% uptime to process payments. 

ROCTEL’s ROCSOLID offering is built for retail. It offers connectivity, collaboration, and security-as-a-service with high availability, automated failover, and diverse routing to optimise uptime, which is crucial in retail. Built on Cisco Meraki, ROCSOLID can reduce the risk of outages and downtime for retailers.

A good example is ROCTEL retail customer Jump Juice. With 30-some outlets around the country, they had sporadic downtime. In their business, that became a significant issue. Someone would order a smoothie, but if they didn’t have cash, they couldn’t pay. Smoothies don’t look so good if they sit on the counter for 10 minutes waiting for the system to come back up.

By moving to ROCSOLID across their locations, Jump Juice got a consistent experience that included millisecond swap-over to secondary connections to optimise uptime. We’re not aware of a single outage in more than a year since switching.

This shift to ROCSOLID, powered by Cisco Meraki, led to noticeable increases in availability and the company made significant revenue gains. Jump Juice also now offers guest Wi-Fi to customers at all locations on a secure connection to enhance the customer experience.

It’s all monitored and managed by ROCTEL, so we can keep an eye on the key connectivity metrics and how it’s performing, and prevent any outages.

The Value of Working with an MSP

Working with an MSP can not only improve your availability, throughput, and cybersecurity, but it can also save you money. This lower fee structure allows an organisation to invest in other areas to grow its business without having to worry about downtime or security issues.

One of the biggest benefits of working with an MSP is the ability to scale a business as needed without having to make significant hardware investments or upgrades. We bring our expertise to business owners who may not have experience in connectivity or security. Instead of them having to learn the ins and outs of specific solutions, MSPs deliver what they need while keeping an eye on their key pain points or the key metrics on connectivity and performance. This partnership frees up business owners to devote their time and energy to their business operations with the confidence that they have reliable, secure connections. When you have the right tech stack working behind the scenes, MSPs can deliver seamless services to do amazing things. 

Building the Technology Infrastructure

Building a robust technology infrastructure to power your business into the future is crucial. It is essential to stay competitive and leverage technology for greater efficiency, productivity, and profitability.

Ultimately, every business in every industry wants the same thing: safe, secure, and efficient solutions that are cost-effective. By trusting an MSP like ROCTEL and technology by Cisco, organisations get high availability to the resources they need in a secure environment, and at an affordable price.

The last few years have been a whirlwind for retailers. Now more than ever, they need to build the proper connectivity foundations to serve customers in any capacity. Lucky for them, they won’t have to do it alone.