Interview with Mr Jean-Bernard Sizaret
Global Technology Manager
McDonald’s France

Project: implementation of SD-WAN for McDonald's France

McDonald's is deploying SD-WAN on its 1,500 sites to support the development of its business uses and enable the reliable use of decentralized applications.
SD-WAN is an innovative concept of virtual network integrating many advanced features overlaying the physical network to meet new digital uses.

What was your initial project?

McDonald's France has always offered innovative services for its customers and employees in its restaurants. The various services and businesses are being digitized to offer our million of daily customers a friendly, fast, efficient and secure service.
We needed an optimized WAN network to support the integration and ensure the proper functioning of all of our current and future solutions.
SD-WAN allows us to gain in reliability and security while guaranteeing the best performance on each of our restaurants according to the technical constraints of each site. The functionalities offered by this new network concept improve our visibility and the functioning of our current applications, and support long-term technological developments in the franchise, in particular the growth of the cloud.

What solution was chosen?

Beyond the links (copper, fiber, 4G / 5G) and the network configuration, we wanted to rely on a managed services operator capable of supporting us in the best possible way in the transition of our network to SD-WAN and its maintenance in operational condition, its optimization and the regular integration of our new services.

Renewing our WAN was a major project that represented 18 months of work.
The experts of our DSI studied the answers of 8 recognized tenderers in the field of telecoms, studied precisely the proposals during the defenses then organized recipes in laboratories, and finally POCs in our restaurants.

We adopted Interway's proposal, based on the Cisco Meraki solution, which perfectly meets our needs and is consistent with the McDonald's group's desire to have a unified technical solution on a global scale.

Why the choice of Interway?

Beyond the technical solution chosen, we were looking for a partner who would know how to take the precise measure of our business needs and challenges in order to administer and optimize the operation of our applications on a daily basis.
Interway, technically and commercially certified Cisco Meraki, was the first to operate all of our applications and to integrate our various specificities on SD-WAN technology.
Its ability to deploy SD-WAN on each restaurant in a single night and to manage the national deployment of our 1,500 sites in 24 months was decisive since the impact of this major project on the business of our restaurants is minimized.
In addition, Interway guarantees us the best possible connectivity to each of our restaurants by being able to offer multi-operator and multi-technological links.
Interway's expertise and technological mastery combined with the understanding of the uses of our different businesses has made Interway a logical choice to support us on this strategic project and in this new technological era.

Le mot d’Eric Jotti
Managing Director of Groupe Interway

Interway has been operating thousands of IPSEC WAN links for more than 10 years on behalf of its customers and incorporates advanced internally developed features into its solutions that are now natively embedded in its SD-WAN solutions.
SD-WAN is redistributing the cards on the market and allowing us to compete with incumbent operators. Better still, the proximity that we have with our customers allows us to operate a WAN made to measure for our customers in order to optimize the operation of their applications.
We share our vision of the Telecom world within the CDRT (Club des Dirigeants des Réseaux Télécoms), SD-WAN is an important step in the Telecom revolution. It is the foundation for a comprehensive network approach with centralized end-to-end management of user connection to their applications, encompassing WAN and LAN. We then speak of SD-Branch.
Our DNA drives us to bring maximum value above our technological offers and has led us to integrate into our SD-WAN solutions innovative functionalities, in particular an AI using all network data for a fluid administration and a WAN that self-adapts to user behavior.
We would like to thank McDonald's for the confidence granted and for the quality of the exchanges during all the stages of this large-scale project which confirms the good positioning and maturity of our SD-WAN offer.