BYOD helps boost creativity and sales for family-owned midmarket furniture manufacturer.

Vitra is a renowned for producing quality furniture. Their designs are well known for innovation and style. What makes Vitra unique is that they not only encourage creativity from their employees but they also invite visitors to participate in their creative process.

Vitra is headquartered in Switzerland and their flagship store, Vitrahaus is located in Weil am Rhein in south Germany. Vitrahaus embodies the company’s vision and this is where visitors get to experience the company’s creations in real life settings.

Vitra has been partnering with Cisco for over a decade. Communications and collaboration are integral to their success and their latest strategy is to embrace the megatrends in mobility and wireless to improve their guest services by enabling BYOD access for employees and customers with simple management. These trends are gaining popularity in midmarket businesses.

Network Challenges:

Vitra was lacking a formal BYOD policy and this was becoming a problem because employees were increasingly using their own devices including smartphones, laptops and tablets. This was causing chaos on their network and affecting the network performance and security. For example, while working with customers at their store using different devices, they would often lose connectivity when moving around.

There was an urgent need to upgrade to a solution that provided simple management of all devices on the network which would result in:

• More productivity
• Better customer experience
• Reduced stress on IT

Solution:

The solution to their problems was a validated Cisco® Borderless Network design, including:

• LAN refresh based on Cisco Nexus® and Catalyst switches.
• Cisco® BYOD Smart Solution featuring Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE).
• Cisco Aironet® Series Access Points with CleanAir®
• Cisco AnyConnect®, combined with Cisco ASA 5520 Series Firewalls

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Benefits:

Vitra was successful in upgrading to a network solution that matches their vision for business transformation by embracing the trends in mobility. Not only are the employees able to collaborate with each other better on various devices, but they are also able to enhance their conversations with customers.

Employee productivity has also gone up since they have the flexibility of using the devices that they like on the same network that supports wired, wireless and VPN. They no longer have to worry about device authentication and remembering multiple passwords.  There are also significant savings in time and money when it comes to IT, since many routine tasks such are taken care of easily.

A unique benefit to Vitra was an increase in customer engagement. Customers can access the network on their own devices at Vitrahaus and access information on the products they are interested in. They are also able to share pictures of products with family and friends.

Vitra has made a great decision by embracing megatrends such as BYOD by upgrading to seamless network architecture with simple device management. But Wait … There’s More!

Learn about Vitra’s future plans to leverage its Cisco BYOD Smart Solution by reading the entire case study.

Learn about the various midmarket products and solutions offered by Cisco.