Secure Private Line Gives Applebees Quicker Service Time for High-Speed Connectivity By Terry Sweeney March 18, 2004

The case for phasing out dial-up connectivity was mounting for John Lynn, senior manager of information systems for 21 Applebee's restaurants in Tennessee and Kentucky. Connection quality was spotty, and rainstorms and high winds often disrupted the older, mostly rural phone systems.

Eighteen months ago, dial-up was the restaurants' workhorse. Phone lines carried not only voice traffic but data, including credit-card transactions and daily electronic reports from each store. But it was proving unreliable. Worse, the delay in getting credit-card payments approved had become the most common customer complaint.

Meantime, the franchise operator, Woodland Group, Brentwood, Tenn., wanted to replace paper gift certificates with magnetic-stripe gift cards, and many suppliers were moving to Web-based ordering.

"Half our stores couldn't connect because of some modem issue, and I'd spend half my morning fixing those problems," Lynn says. Store managers were spending a lot of time troubleshooting the modems, too. Sometimes they were forced to send reports to headquarters by paper mail.

Getting up to Speed
It was time for high-speed connectivity. Lynn sought bids from three service providers that could offer a secure, managed service. He wanted abundant connectivity for a host of strategic initiatives, including the gift cards, Web ordering and daily polling to check store information, such as the take for Sunday brunch, the distribution of milk inventory or the number of busboys working a given shift.

"If you want to make an impact in this business, you have to have that information on the day it's happening," Lynn says. "Three or four days afterward is too late to solve a labor or inventory problem."

Of course, Woodland, whose sole business is running 21 of Applebee's 1,500 restaurants, also was concerned about security. "We had seen a couple of franchise groups put in expensive backbones and have big problems with viruses and malicious hackers," Lynn says. "We didn't want to open ourselves to that." One such network went down about 18 months ago as a result of a worm attack, he adds.

The service Woodland settled on, from Cybera, Nashville, Tenn., gives Woodland a routed, private-line network, with DSL connectivity at all but three of the most remote restaurants, where only MPLS is available. Each point-to-point line is fully managed and secured by Cybera, and its switches are from CoSine Communications.

Cybera stood out when compared with the two other bidders, ISDN-Net, Nashville, and Intermedia Communications, Tampa, Fla., because those companies proposed all-frame-relay networks. That would have meant higher upfront costs--about $1,600 more per site--and monthly charges of almost double the $3,300 offered by Cybera's DSL/MPLS.

Lynn's informal RFP set out the following requirements:

Transport IP traffic securely between the restaurants and the corporate office.
Work with a single firewall, as opposed to 22 firewalls for all store locations and headquarters.
Separate credit-card transactions from the firewall so approvals go through even if the firewall goes down.
It wasn't hard to make the case for the project. Indeed, Lynn is one of four members of Woodland's executive committee, which approves all major projects.

At Cybera's price, Lynn calculated a break-even period of 18 months, based on savings for dial-up costs and staff labor. "It was a slam dunk. We didn't have long discussions about ROI and no one was asking, 'Should we move off dial-up?' Our biggest issue was whether we could do it securely," Lynn says.

Woodland, a six-year-old privately held company, recorded $34 million in revenue last year. Its restaurants, scattered between central Tennessee and southern Kentucky, generate 52,000 electronic transactions per month.

Charges for the managed service average $150 per month per location--"a very reasonable price," according to Mark Mellis, of SystemExperts, a Sudbury, Mass., consultancy that specializes in network security services. It sounds even better when you consider that Woodland didn't have to handle the installation and doesn't deal with telephone companies in 22 cities or manage the installations on an ongoing basis, Mellis adds.

"Instead of connecting those lines to the public Internet, we connect them to a virtual router in our facility that ties them together in a closed IP network," says Cliff Duffey, Cybera CEO. The virtual router contains all the policies that control how each location connects and what rights it has once it's connected.

Cybera guarantees Woodland 99.5 percent availability on the line between each location and the network, and so far has averaged 99.98 percent availability. The service and the equipment are fully managed, and Cybera promises a response within 15 minutes if there's a problem.

Although the business case for the Cybera service was clear, not every enterprise is quite so willing to outsource network security. A financial services company that processes billions of dollars in transactions per day, for example, might be wary of farming out something as strategic as security. In Woodland's case, Lynn says there wasn't much debate over the wisdom of a managed security offering. "Our expertise is not in security or in backbone routing, and we only have a couple of people in IT here, so outsourcing connectivity and the security made a lot of sense for us," Lynn says.

Since implementing the service, the polling information has become more reliable. It takes only 10 minutes per day to download and can be examined by management first thing every Monday morning, Lynn says, which has meant more informed business decisions about staffing and inventory.

Faster and more continual downloads mean data can stay in sync as each restaurant receives information from both Applebee's International and Woodland. It prevents the store from ordering supplies twice when a new menu item is added, for instance. "We adjust data files so stores get credit on their food costs," Lynn says. "This has really helped us get our controllables in line."

The high-speed, high-reliability network lets Woodland consider another application: Webcam surveillance. The franchiser is testing cameras in a high-theft location. "We view it as a remote management tool," Lynn says.

©2004 NCSP