Southern Sun

 

Hotels

With a heritage of 50 years of excellence, Southern Sun has over 100 hotels in South Africa and as one of the largest hotel groups locally, they offer a diverse collection of accommodation, conference rooms and banqueting facilities.

Hospitality
Project Scope
We were approached by Southern Sun to takeover the Wifi management of many their properties. This would entail the migration of each of these properties to a new bandwidth management service as well as the migration and consolidation of all the Wifi access points from their current provider to a single controller. The challenge? To complete the migration of 50+ sites across South Africa in less than 5 months, including the migration of 1500+ Ruckus access points to a central controller.

Property

  • Southern Sun hotels
  • 100+ properties in SA

Requirements

  • Migration and consolidation of all Wifi access points located in hotels across the country to three data centers hosting virtual controllers

Solutions

  • Hoist Fusion Dell Server

Results

  • All sites were migrated successfully within 1-2 days, Including their entire Wi-Fi network.
  • All sites were migrated in under 5 months

The Solution

The heart of the entire solution is the Hoist Fusion platform, where a single Dell server is used to allow for monitoring and managing of all HSIA service and client devices which require seamless internet connectivity, providing the best guest experience.

A Dell server had to be shipped and installed at each individual site with a team to facilitate the migration. Each migration was meticulously planned to shrink the window required for the migration to 1-2 days depending on the complexity of the site. This required an intimate understanding of existing infrastructure and best practices to expediate the migrations with as little impact to guests and staff as possible.

A landing page was designed to resemble the functionality of the previous service, using room-based authentication to identify guest. This also… allowed for a reward base implementation to provide greater service to regular guests.

During that migration, training was provided to all staff to familiarize them with the new functionality provided by the platform.

After the migrations, complete network inspections were caried out to ensure that all current network elements where actively monitored for quality and support purposes. 

Interested in a VOD Solution?

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The Result

After the migration there were immediate positive reactions by staff and guests. The new platform showed a remarkable increase in performance, both reducing the amount of Wi-Fi related calls as well as increasing the positive response of guests, who often claimed that the new on boarding via the landing page was much simpler and more effective than the old service.

Conference organization was also simplified. IN the place of multiple SSIDs. A single SSID for conferences was provided with an easy-to-use conference tool that allowed hotel staff to set up their own conference with out the need of a third party and without third party costs.

The active monitoring allowed for better support of the properties and with the logging of data such as bandwidth utilization, device connections and trends, it was possible to proactively identify certain issues and provide meaningful feedback to the properties.

Southern Sun HOTELS FEEDBACK
"Southern Sun Hotels engaged with VOD Media regarding the Wi-Fi management platform with a view to improve and better deliver the offering to our guests. After a detailed and in-depth consultative process and comprehensive technical design, we agreed on a POC which was concluded successfully with the desired outcomes. To date over 65 hotels across Southern Africa have been deployed. Southern Sun Hotels are very satisfied with the product, support and ongoing commitment from the VOD Team. This ambitious project was rolled out by the Southern Sun IT team and VOD in record time.

A notable commitment to client and projects with ongoing service excellence and sound technical engagements - thanks VOD”
Ryan Smith - Group IT Infrastructure Manager