AL-KO Case Study

AL-KO Gardentech is one of the global players among German medium-sized companies. The modern company with long-established traditions and Headquarters in Kötz, Germany employs around 700 people and operates at 19 locations all over the world. In 2023, AL-KO Gardentech reported revenue of around 250 million Euros. What began in 1966 with the production of the first lawn mower has developed into one of the market leaders in the garden tool sector to this day. The products have always been manufactured with a high degree of care, creativity and technical perfection. The brand promise “QUALITY FOR LIFE” stands for the unique product and service quality of AL-KO then as it does now.

The Challenge

Prior to working with Aryaka, AL-KO had 19 sites globally connected by various WAN solutions such as site-to-site VPN, DMVPN, and primarily MPLS. Their challenges included:

• Mounting expenses to maintain MPLS and WAN optimization infrastructure.
• Slow process to onboard new MPLS sites.
• Frequent and prolonged MPLS outages due to communication challenges between the MPLS provider and local partners in certain countries.
• Cloud services, particularly Microsoft 365, experienced slow performance as public internet traffic was routed through a central firewall.

The Solution

Aryaka implemented a proof of concept across customer sites in Denmark and China.

Following the successful proof of concept, Aryaka’s solution was deployed to all sites, including the customer’s main datacenter in Germany.

After four years of using the Aryaka SD-WAN solution, some advantages became more apparent:

• Considerable reduction in outage frequency by leveraging different ISPs and ISP circuits, with improved service restoration times.
• Aryaka went the extra mile by implementing a feature request that enhanced failover for security connectors with our third-party security partner.
• Excellent last-mile monitoring capabilities between the ANAP and the PoP facilitated easy troubleshooting of performance issues in local ISP backbones. For example, one of our local ISP providers had a defective SFP module in a router within its backbone. We were able to provide accurate statistics regarding the increasing packet loss and TCP retransmissions. This helped the ISP to quickly identify and resolve the issue.”