Australia Post is “in the early stages” of using Cisco ThousandEyes to improve visibility of network and application performance in its retail footprint of “well over 3000 sites”.
Australia Post’s Adam Goodall.
The deployment is the latest in a program of work upgrading technology and connectivity across the retail network to improve availability and resiliency.
Head of technology, cloud and infrastructure Adam Goodall told Cisco Live in Melbourne that ThousandEyes had been deployed to all branches ahead of the annual Christmas peak period, which runs November through December.
“We’ve deployed ThousandEyes and we’re really in the early stages, so this is [about] exploring the possibilities,” he said.
“We have it deployed to our retail footprint, which is well over 3000 sites and over 8000 terminals.
“We’re taking the approach of flipping monitoring on its head. Rather than focusing on the endpoint, which is still important, we’re actually monitoring the individual retail locations now.
“We’re really able to get the experience from the remote location rather than from the system and we’re really excited to see where that dashboarding is going to lead us as we go forward”.
Goodall noted that Australia Post had made considerable efforts to improve connectivity options at post offices.
It previously upgraded sites to NBN, with connectivity centrally managed via a Cisco Meraki SD-WAN.
Earlier this year, it also provided Starlink to some of its most far-flung locations for added resiliency.
“A lot of the LPOs [licensed post offices] are in really remote regional locations and they’re critical for the communities, so trying to provide a reliable, consistent network into those locations is a real challenge for us,” Goodall said.
“It’s something we’ve taken great steps over the last couple of years to improve”.
Goodall suggested this focus would continue for the foreseeable future.
“We’re really clear on what our commitment is to our communities and customers, and so we’ll always look for opportunities where we can continue to improve resilience and availability,” he said.
Goodall said that Australia Post has, in total, some 25,000 devices under management, “mostly Meraki”.
Meraki networking is a feature of Australia Post’s “high-tech” support centre in Burnley, Melbourne, which has only been open about a year.
“We’ve invested heavily in the Meraki campus solution,” Goodall said.
“We’ve really tried to modernise that experience as much as we can. We’ve taken a wi-fi only approach there, so no blue cables.
“We’re running some really critical services out of that support centre, [including the] contact centre, taking calls from customers and communities, and the experience has been really great.
“[It’s] something we’re looking to go wider right across our other sites across the country”.