Case Study: Giant Eagle achieves centralized multi‑vendor wireless management and faster troubleshooting with HPE Aruba Networking (AirWave)

Giant Eagle Uses AirWave to Operate a Highly Distributed, Multi-Vendor Retail Wireless Network

Giant Eagle, a $7.1B grocery retailer with over 400 sites, had grown a mission-critical but highly heterogeneous wireless LAN—about 1,300 access points from Cisco and Motorola supporting thousands of users—into a management challenge for a four-person IT team. Multiple AP models, geographically distributed sites, limited visibility into client usage, and the need to migrate legacy hardware and security settings without disrupting operations made centralized, multi-vendor management essential.

Giant Eagle deployed the AirWave Wireless Management Suite from Aruba to unify multi-vendor configuration, monitor radios and clients, and push template-based changes remotely. The platform enabled a fast, company-wide transition to 802.1X, cut routine configuration work from weeks to minutes (saving hundreds of man-hours), improved remote troubleshooting, and delivered client-level visibility (peaks above 7,000 simultaneous users), allowing better capacity planning and fewer on-site service visits.

Giant Eagle

James Lersch

Network Services Engineer