Otto Bros. now updates all South African stores, despite poor connectivity

Introduction

As one of the leading distributors of retail fashion in the South African region, Otto Bros is pushing out merchandise across 88 stores. Ensuring that every branch’s POS is up-to-date with the most recent and accurate information is crucial.

Challenge: Distributing POS Updates Over Unreliable Networks

Poor networks are a well-known dilemma for huge retailers in the South African region. Operating in a Windows environment, Otto Bros tried various mechanisms to deploy software updates to 470 endpoints over unreliable networks. Working with limited bandwidth, the company tried establishing communication and transferring data over ADSL, satellite, and 3g cellular connections – each connection offering some form of complication.

“Often, after a file was transferred to our machines, everything would look fine. We would later learn, after we started using the file, that it was corrupt on the receiving end.”– Jacques Vermeulen, Project Manager.

Before Resilio, the enterprise used straight file copy solutions (rsync, ftp) to deploy WAR file POS updates – “which was disastrous, the products all had issues with connectivity and transfers.” The IT team’s major pain was that the solutions they tried, lacked the power to reliably transfer and report the status of each distribution job to their endpoints.

Solution: uTorrent P2P Distributed Technology

Otto Bros partnered with Resilio for a reliable, seamless, and resilient software deployment solution. While searching for the right product, the team wanted a uTorrent based solution. By capitalizing over Resilio’s WAN optimization and bandwidth scheduling feature, Otto Bros could successfully build and deploy customized packages to specified stores and machines.

“In the past, we had to script manually, which is an extremely tedious process and with Resilio Connect it’s quite easy and seamless,” said Vermeulen.

Future

The IT team at Otto Bros is exploring the power behind Resilio Connect and plans to customize and automate different scripting packages per store, machine, and assigned groups. Additionally, the team plans to use Resilio as a tool to optimize Human Resource tools – recording and distributing training videos to stores.

“The results we get about the file transfer being completed and having no issues with the files on the other end has been fantastic. These are things I couldn’t do before using Connect.”– Jacques Vermeulen, Project Manager.
Industry

Retail

“We here at Turner Sports like to try new things. If there's something new, I'm always willing to jump into the pool and try it out. Some people are stuck in their old ways and workflows. Well, there might be a better way. For us, that's Resilio.” — Brady Small, Sr. Production Engineer Sports Central Systems.
Read Customer Story
"We were able to turn around graphic proofs quicker based on our staff’s availability, versus forcing it through a bottleneck at a specific office. Connect has made us more efficient" — Ken Brubacher, Project Manager.
Read Customer Story
“Our engineers deployed a successful test version in an hour - without reading a ton of manuals - that delivered the best result of all the solutions we tried” — Roman Sakno, Enterprise Architect at Wargaming.
Read Customer Story
"Resilio Connect enables us to reliably distribute our code, specifically new language models in a fraction of time. These copy jobs now take an hour, down from eight."— Christian Bryndum, VoiceBase’s Director of Operations
Read Customer Story
“Resilio would keep Ross Maritime fully compliant and would be very easy to use for those onboard the vessels.”— Brent Nevison, IT consultant at Ross Maritime.
Read Customer Story
"If we bought about 40 additional servers it would have been pretty expensive. Resilio is a much cheaper solution for us right now." — Mario Jost, Systems Engineer @Mercedes-Benz
Read Customer Story
“Our entire situation is tremendously better, great cost savings and our data is now delivered on time.” — Jason McCune , Director of Information Technology.
Read Customer Story
“I see Resilio Connect as being absolutely pivotal to the way they work now. The media and entertainment industry is really an ideal opportunity for this technology.” — Abraham Treadwell, Tangelo CEO. (Blockhead's IT Consultants)
Read Customer Story
“For us, the main thing was fast transfer of data and obviously maintaining the integrity of all the data that we sync to our offices. And definitely the cost is very important. We were happy to find a solution where we could use our in-place architecture to keep down the cost.” — Sebastiaan Sprengers, Lead Tools Programmer @Larian Studios.
Read Customer Story
“With Resilio, you know your job has run and you can initiate scripting triggers to get feedback from clients to know if a patch is installed correctly or not” — Senior ICT Engineer (name withheld for the privacy of our customer)
Read Customer Story
"The results we get about the file transfer being completed and having no issues with the files on the other end has been fantastic. These are things I couldn’t do before using Connect.." — Jacques Vermeulen, Project Manager.
Read Customer Story
“Resilio Connect has been a game changer. It’s proven to be reliable in file transfer, It’s proven to be reliable in database replication. Overall, Resilio Connect jobs are very easy to set up and they just work!”— IT Developer at Lindblad Expeditions
Read Customer Story