Affordable Home Furnishings Within Reach With Automation

Badcock opened 30 stores over the last two years. Rapid expansion meant its network needed to support more stores, more applications, and more transactions. “Our business growth drove the need for a network refresh,” says Andrew Pou, a fifth-generation family member and manager of network services at Badcock.

Badcock’s IT team supports the technology needs of the company at all 378 stores, three distribution centers, and back-office operations across eight states. Fast, ultrareliable, and secure connectivity is critical to support store owners, retail customers, and corporate employees. In addition to network outages, which could disrupt sales, cybersecurity threats can lead to data theft and compromised systems at the stores. “We need an extremely reliable connection to support store sales,” Pou says.

Badcock relies on a broad variety of on-premises and cloudbased applications and services for retail operations. The network supports all aspects of business operations, from customer financing to dealer management to administration. It also relies on a cloud-based collaboration solution for phones, videoconferencing, and team messaging.

With a small IT team, automation is key to delivering IT services at scale. A Juniper network simplifies automation, providing a foundation of open frameworks, APIs, and toolkits. “Juniper is very open and built around automation,” says Kevin McNeil, IT architect at Badcock. “Juniper works great with anything we want to automate”.

Although the Badcock IT team was new to the Juniper Networks Junos operating system, they quickly acclimated to a new way of network operations. “Junos OS is really intuitive,” Pou says. “The CLI is very easy to use.” With Juniper, the IT team can have confidence that its Juniper network will scale to support customer transactions and business applications as the 116-year-old company delivers great in-store and e-commerce experiences to customers who want to freshen up their homes.