Case Study: Marston's PLC achieves scalable, cost-saving nationwide network monitoring with Progress (WhatsUp Gold)

Managing and Monitoring Retail Data Networks and a Nationwide Telecoms Platform

Marston’s, one of Britain’s largest brewers with over 2,100 pubs and a managed estate of 500+ sites, set up its own telecoms arm to cut costs and deliver new services (public WiFi, EPOS, gaming) to pubs and 130 home workers. Building and operating a nationwide broadband head-end created a challenge: the company needed scalable, clear network visibility and fast fault identification across hundreds of remote routers and WiFi devices to ensure reliable connectivity and control costs.

Working with Level 8 Solutions, Marston’s deployed Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold to monitor the telecoms network 24x7, giving a single real-time view of hardware and connectivity and clear alerts for faults. The platform enabled remote troubleshooting that cut engineer visits, improved SLA management, can scale as the estate grows, and contributed to estimated annual savings of about £500,000 while supporting plans to expand the service to more sites.

Marston's PLC

Mike McMinn

Director of IT