La Marzocco

La Marzocco

Customer

La Marzocco Australasia distributes and services La Marzocco handmade coffee machines throughout Australia and New Zealand with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

Background

Having just split from its parent company and in the midst of moving to a new Sydney showroom, La Marzocco came into FY15/16 with an array of IT challenges including migrating systems and hardware. La Marzocco asked JMIW if we could help with things like:

  • Planning for and deploying new network infrastructure to compensate for the loss of the previous parent company’s mature network
  • Moving from a proprietary CRM system (Exchequer) to cloud hosted SAP, which is used by the La Marzocco group internationally.
  • Moving away from the parent company’s largely Terminal Services based remote desktop environment for their users.
  • Moving from the parent company’s remote desktop-based file server storage.
  • Implementing local Active Directories with replication across the three locations.

Solution

Such a complex series of changes required IT expertise and leadership across a variety of specialties. JMIW was able to meet all the challenges thrown our way, including planning, organising and implementing the following:

  • New Active Directory servers, structures and group policies so that
  • IPSec tunnels to replicate MPLS network functionality so that
  • Box.com implementation with replication to NAS for redundancy so that
  • Documentation of all existing hardware, processes and routing so that these were less obscure to La Marzocco and we could return power and independence to them.

Meeting challenges along the way

Moving away from a majority RDP environment to cloud services and local AD with replication involved larger amounts of data transit over the internet. Previously, La Marzocco had got by with a combination of ADSL, dedicated 8/8 Ethernet video conferencing service and a 4/4 SHDSL line directly into the parent company’s network and thus their RDP environment, where most data was transmitted solely over internal networks. However the new systems would require something with more capacity.

Getting this capacity was difficult, partly thanks to La Marzocco’s Melbourne’s location in the inner suburb of Abbotsford where internet infrastructure is saturated. Securing a sufficiently fast Ethernet business internet connection proved near impossible. Further complicating matters was the company’s existing mish-mash of connections consuming all available pairs. We had to take a careful approach. Managing disconnections of existing infrastructure while replacing functionality was complex, but through working closely with ISP Spinktel, we were able to discontinue services and free up copper pairs in a staggered fashion, bringing the new Ethernet service in at 10/10 but ramping up to 20/20 throughout the deployment.

Benefits

  • Through working with JMIW, La Marzocco got
  • Simplified infrastructure with built-in redundancy and mobility
  • Autonomy and independence
  • Greater organisational knowledge and increased decision making capability across all IT services.

Having implemented these new systems and processes, JWIM now provides ongoing IT support to La Marzocco.