Case Study: Café Rio achieves 25X bandwidth boost and reliable omnichannel ordering with VMware NSX SD-WAN

Utilizing SD-Wan in Restaurant Hospitality to Elevate the Customer Experience

Café Rio, a fast-growing restaurant chain based in Salt Lake City with nearly 115 locations, needed to deliver a true omnichannel experience—mobile and online ordering, in-store kiosks, queue-management tablets, guest Wi‑Fi and manager devices—while sustaining aggressive 20% year‑over‑year growth. Its legacy network couldn’t provide the required bandwidth, centralized management or QoS for VoIP and POS, leading to outages, slow or dropped calls, lost orders and customer frustration.

Café Rio deployed VMware NSX SD‑WAN by VeloCloud—centralized orchestration with SD‑WAN Edges and active‑active dual Internet links—rolled out in phases and installed over the top of existing infrastructure to avoid downtime. The solution boosted available bandwidth 25×, improved VoIP quality and PCI‑segmented POS traffic, simplified new-site deployments, eliminated the need for costly PBX hardware (about $10,000 per location) and is projected to save more than $200,000 per year in communications, enabling the omnichannel customer experience.

Cafe Rio

Kevin Masterson

VP of Information Technology