McMahons Builders Providers
McMahons Builders Providers have been providing quality building supplies and DIY materials to the trade and public for over 190 years and have grown to become one of the largest independent builder’s providers on the island of Ireland, with a network of 14 retail and trade branches, as well as a Truss Manufacturing plant. McMahons offer a one stop shop offering, with a wide range of products catering for the Builder, DIY enthusiast and Home Owner.
McMahons extensive product range includes building materials, plumbing & heating, timber & sheeting, insulation, plant & tool hire, painting & decorating, doors & floors, bathrooms, garden and outdoor and much more. McMahons Builders Providers is a privately-owned Irish company, with its headquarters located in Limerick City.
What McMahons looked for in a WAN (Wide Area Network) provider?
Due to the nature of the business it is critical for McMahons to have reliable and fault tolerant IT infrastructure. All McMahons sites use centralised IT services such as POS (Point of Sale), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), Email, VOIP etc. To ensure those services are available for all branches it was imperative to have reliable resilient communication links between all sites, the head office and the internet.
Why we chose Magnet+?
We chose Magnet+ for a number of reasons. First of all, we liked their customer focused approach. Magnet+ listened to what we required; reliable connectivity with low latency between all our sites and reliable connectivity to the internet. We also liked their flexible proactive approach to meeting our business requirements. They gave us options for each site in terms of connectivity, circuit size, circuit type and path diversity and if we wanted a fully managed service or partially managed service. They offered expert advice while also taking on board our requirements and technical input.
Ultimately, we decided to have the best of both worlds and implement a self-managed SD-WAN with Magnet+ MPLS circuits for primary with Magnet+ also sourcing DSL or radio connectivity for our backup connectivity in each site. The MPLS is provided via either radio or fibre optic in a full mesh design. This allowed us to have low latency primary circuits, flexibility in how we route traffic and having path diversity in each site. It also helped from a manageability perspective that all circuits were sourced and supported from Magnet+. Magnet+ also provide Internet to McMahons via fibre optic in our primary IT site and via radio in our backup location. This ensures all our WAN and internet services are fully redundant and route via our primary site. Routing all internet traffic via our primary site has allowed us to reduce the number of telephone lines and DSL lines on our remote sites thus helping reduce costs and helping secure McMahons.
As a customer what was the experience like during go live?
Magnet+ provided a Project Manager throughout the whole process from design to delivery. The PM hosted weekly meeting weekly meetings for our IT team and Account Manager which greatly helped ensure a smooth on time delivery of services. All the connectivity was delivered as per our schedule and as per our agreed IP design and configuration per site. The installation and documentation on all sites were to a very high standard. Following go live Magnet+ provided us with a cloud portal to view our MPLS circuits activity. We also get notifications for any planned out of hours maintenance in advance. Our Account Manager frequently calls us to see how we are doing. The overall experience of the implementation and after service has been very positive from a McMahons IT perspective. The end users have also seen the benefit with improved performance and reliability of IT services.
Find out more about McMahons Builders Providers.
