Belnet asked Wim Derijnck, Team Manager of the Network Solutions Team at Colruyt Group, why the retail group decided to connect to BNIX in 2019:
“Your infrastructure allows us to improve our connectivity significantly. Colruyt is very cost-conscious. Everything that we do must be done in function of customer satisfaction. Our customers expect to be able to download their shopping lists from the internet quickly.
We have also been offering our customers “free Wi-Fi” in the shops of Colruyt, Okay, Dreamland, Spar, etc. for the last two years. We see that those customers mainly surf to GAFA[1] and Netflix-like services, and BNIX offers good connectivity to these players. Lots of apps that used to run on our infrastructure are being moved to the cloud. With BNIX you have quite short paths to all those players and therefore high quality.
A connection to BNIX also has the advantage that you can set up peerings with local telecom providers. Our e-commerce customers are located in Belgium, France and Luxembourg. In the event of a problem with a transit connection, you could cut off this connection and redirect the traffic through BNIX. Our customers who surf to Collect&Go from home would still be able to place their orders.
Finally, it offers us extra redundancy. In the coronavirus era, all internal employees work from home. If one of our transit providers is in trouble, we have extra capacity at our disposal via BNIX.”
What has access to BNIX changed for the Colruyt Group?
“Our two data centres are not richly endowed with carriers. During each negotiation, we run into the “last mile”, which must be delivered by one of the two traditional telecom players. To avoid that you must invest in fibre-optic connections to a carrier-neutral data centre in Belgium. That is a serious investment and connecting to BNIX was one of the key factors to justify the investment. It helped us make that business case and get it approved by our board.”
How do you experience the interaction with our organisation?
“Very positive: clear transparent prices and quick delivery. I can recommend it to everyone.”
[1] GAFA = Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon