Orange juices JDE expansion with SD-WAN | Computer Weekly

Coffee company Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE) has deployed an Orange Business Services secure end-to-end connectivity offering for more than 120 locations worldwide, based on flexible software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, JDE is a subsidiary of JDE Peet’s, the world’s leading pure-play coffee and tea company. The company has been operating for more than 265 years, and calculates that it currently serves approximately 4,500 cups of coffee or tea per second. It’s active in more than 100 countries, through a portfolio of more than 50 brands, including L’OR, Jacobs, Senseo, Tassimo, Douwe Egberts, OldTown, Super, Pickwick and Moccona. In 2021, JDE Peet’s generated total sales of €7bn and employed a global workforce of more than 19,000 employees.

As it carries on with its mission, JDE said it wanted a highly scalable infrastructure that could fulfil both its bespoke requirements and growing business demands into the future. Orange Business Services has implemented a global connectivity service using managed Flexible SD-WAN across 40 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America. In addition, Orange provides a range of managed network security services across the core infrastructure of JDE’s datacentres, located in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo and Singapore, along with cloud-based security offerings. 

Flexible SD-WAN is said to have already demonstrated its value early on by supporting JDE’s merger and acquisition activities following its recently acquired company in the Asia Pacific region. JDE immediately integrated the new teams and sites into its global IT infrastructure, allowing them to access corporate applications and the network. This saved a significant amount of time and allowed for rapid onboarding.

“Orange Business Services has helped us build a strong, resilient, and above all, scalable and secure connectivity infrastructure,” said Alexander Min, global IT director of global information systems at JDE. “This has quickly put us on a solid transformational path, providing the digital and flexible services our business demands to reach our expansion goals. In addition, we have seen an improved end-user experience, particularly in distant locations.”

Nemo Verbist, senior vice-president for Europe at Orange Business Services, said: “JDE is benefiting from a secure and agile infrastructure built on our Evolution Platform connectivity, cloud and security expertise.

“This approach is designed to accelerate its digital transformation and propel its business forward. The company has already seen major performance benefits with the ability to quickly turn up and add new sites to its network, and this is hopefully just the beginning of a fruitful partnership.”