International food services company Famous Brands has appointed Turrito Networks to manage the entire wide area network (WAN) serving its South African manufacturing plants, distribution centres and head office.

The Famous Brands franchise network includes Steers, Wimpy, Debonairs Pizza, Mugg & Bean, Tashas and Wakaberry, among many others. “Our network is the basis of all the IT services we deliver,” says Famous Brands Group IT Executive Chris Botha. “Our franchisees place hundreds of orders daily and if we can’t process invoices, we can’t deliver products.

Botha says Famous Brands decided to move from a dual-vendor to a single-vendor network strategy, partly to reduce complexity and partly to prepare for further development.

“Over the past two years we’ve been working towards establishing a single WAN that handles both failover and primary links. We want to move our applications into a hosted environment, and having our distribution centres linked to a single network will reduce the number of hops between them and the data centre, which is an important contributor to application speed and performance.

“Our network uptime from Turrito as one of two vendors has been exceptional,” adds Botha. “Their service has been excellent and their cost model is extremely favourable compared to their competitors.”

Turrito Networks commercial director Louis Jardim says the company’s network-agnostic model adds real value for its clients. “As a bulk buyer of connectivity from the major networks we get discounts that we can pass on to our customers, while keeping our focus clearly on ensuring excellent service.”

Jardim says the deal is “a massive win” for Turrito. “To have a company like Famous Brands entrust its entire network to us, over some of the biggest players in the industry, is a significant milestone. With fibre links to all their sites, augmented by microwave links for failover, we’re able to offer them less complexity and greater economies of scale.”