Reebonz

Overview

An eCommerce business with various well-known luxury brands as part of their product portfolio, Reebonz Limited aims to create an easy way to buy and sell luxury items. Started in Singapore in 2009, Reebonz offers ‘accessible luxury’ shopping to its members, who can buy from new and pre-owned luxury merchandise collections.

As a rapidly growing business with more than 250 employees across 8 countries, Torres Oey, Chief Technology Officer, recognises that leading technology is the backbone to support the fulfilment and operations-intensive requirements of the business. With the Cisco Meraki full stack, comprised of MR access points, MS switches, and MX security appliances, Torres is able to ensure the rapid expansion of Reebonz with a robust and secure network across their corporate offices and warehouse facilities.

 

Original Networking Challenges

The previous networking solution used a mix of vendors, making it difficult for the Reebonz IT team to manage the network effectively across their distributed sites. With just two members on the IT team, Torres needed a solution that provided a better network management experience for his lean team.

 

Why Cisco Meraki?

While looking for an improved next generation firewall, Torres was introduced to Meraki through Reebonz’s channel partners as a solution that could improve their existing security solution. In particular, Reebonz was looking for a solution with intrusion prevention system and intrusion detection system (amongst other things), so the Meraki MX security appliance was recommended to them as a solution.

In addition, given the rapid expansion to new countries, Torres wanted the new solution to allow his team simplified maintenance of their network. Using Meraki, Torres discovered the possibility of having their network managed through the cloud and how easy network management could be. It was “the ease of maintenance of Meraki that was a big factor” in their decision-making process, said Torres.

“I chose Meraki because I was able manage my whole network on one single product,” Torres said. “With Meraki, I can practically map out my network floor-by-floor, switch-by-switch, as well as all the access points on all the different floors of the office and the warehouse.”

I chose Meraki because I was able manage my whole network on one single product

 

Torres Oey

Chief Technology Officer.

The Deployment

The deployment planning process took the longest time, with almost four months dedicated to network planning, including laying out the cables through the office and the warehouses. Once the deployment plan was finalised and all the cables laid out, Reebonz and his channel partners deployed the MX100 security appliances as the United Threat Management device and the MS350 switches for Layer 3 switching for both their offices and warehouse. “The deployment was relatively quick and painless for my team,” mentioned Torres.

To provide wireless, Reebonz deployed a combination of MR32 indoor access points for their offices and MR72 outdoor access points for their warehouses based on the projected usage to suit the the fulfilment needs of Reebonz. These access points were deployed by plugging them in via power over ethernet (PoE). “Since the APs were easy to plug in via PoE, this process became really simple and quick,” said Torres.

 

Results

Torres and his IT team of two can now manage their whole network of offices and warehouses in 8 countries from their headquarters in Singapore with the cloud-based dashboard. “With Meraki, we can pinpoint at any time which access point is not working, or whether there may be a power failure on a specific floor of the office.”

As an example, Torres received a phone call from his operations team over the weekend about how the wireless was not working. “Thankfully, I have downloaded the Meraki app on my Android phone. All I needed to do was to check the network and I noticed that all the Meraki wireless APs were online and working — turns out there was a problem with one of our servers which stopped them from accessing the application server and nothing wrong with the Meraki network.” This has allowed his team to change the way they approach troubleshooting. “Instead of coming into the office every time there is a problem, we can troubleshoot remotely with Meraki, saving the team a lot of time and effort,” added Torres.

As part of the future expansion plan of the Reebonz, Meraki will allow Torres to reduce the deployment times for new sites. He can simply clone existing settings and push these configurations from the cloud across the new devices in minutes, saving time and money in the long run.