New Seasons Market
New Seasons Markets is proud to say that we buy local so you can buy local, keeping more of the money we spend as a community, right here at home where it belongs. We buy from farmers, ranchers, creamery co-ops, fishers and crabbers who are real Oregonians and Washingtonians, local artisan cheese makers, Willamette Valley vintners, Central Oregon brewers, Portland coffee roasters, neighborhood artists who handcraft soaps, candles, pottery and greeting cards. Then New Seasons adds familiar products to our shelves like Bumblebee Tuna and Best Foods mayo. The result is New Seasons Market. Easy and fun to shop. Locally owned and operated. From free-range chicken to Frosted Flakes, we have what you need.
The Challenge
The challenge for us was supporting the growing number of employees at our store locations, and accessing information from our other sites. We were paying a lot for T1's which didn't provide enough bandwidth to meet our needs. The slow connections we had before were creating the perception that our computers and/or our applications were slow. The reality is, we were saturating our VPN connections between our locations. We met with several vendors and their solutions were to bond T1s or try an MPLS solution, which would still have limited bandwidth. The price of the other proposed solutions were also very expensive. We considered cable, but we wanted a service with a strong SLA behind it and guaranteed uptime. DSL wasn't an option at some of our locations, and was still limited in bandwidth. Customer service was also a frustration point with our previous providers. When we would call to place a trouble ticket, we experienced long periods of "on hold" time. When we finally did get someone, it would still take several hours to get our issues resolved.
The Solution
Freewire has been a win-win-win situation for our company. Win #1: Our telecom budget has gone down significantly since we were able to discontinue our T1 circuits. Win #2: IT is happy because we have a private network that is easy to manager, always up, and backed by exceptional customer service. Win #3: The staff at our stores are happy because they are no longer experiencing latency related to saturated VPNs. The user experience was immediately improved when we implemented Freewire. File transfers are more reliable and are completed in a shorter amount of time. Service calls are rarely needed, and when they are made, the resolution often occurs while we're still on the phone with the help desk.
Summary
We've been with Freewire from the early days and have had the opportunity to grow together. We have worked with few other providers that demonstrate the integrity, expertise, value, flexibility, responsiveness, and customer service that Freewire provides.