Transforming Retail Network Operations with Hughes SD-WAN at Sportsman’s Warehouse
“We chose Hughes for their ability to fully manage and modernize our network infrastructure, freeing our IT team to focus on innovation and growth. Their managed SD-WAN solution has delivered reliability, flexibility, and significant cost savings—empowering our employees to deliver a better customer experience and ensuring our stores run smoothly for both staff and shoppers.”
Customer
Founded in 1986, Sportsman’s Warehouse is an outdoor sporting goods retailer with the mission of providing outdoor enthusiasts with quality merchandise. The retail chain consists of 145 stores across the US, each carrying an assortment of over 60,000 items with region-specific products for local outdoor activities.
Challenge
Sportsman’s Warehouse struggled with a legacy, homegrown network infrastructure that demanded significant manual configuration and upkeep—placing a massive burden on internal IT resources. The retailer had a fragmented network setup, requiring the on-site configuration of upwards of five 48-port switches, 10 access points, and firewall and SD-WAN routers.
Hughes Solution
Hughes helped streamline the Sportsman’s Warehouse network, delivering transformative broadband enablement through its managed SD-WAN services.
A pilot rollout of 10–12% of store locations demonstrated strong performance and reliability. The success sparked enthusiasm for a full network-wide deployment of the Hughes SD-WAN solution. This effort demonstrated the value of deep customer alignment, with Hughes taking on the complete responsibility for installation, security, and management while tailoring offerings to meet specific retail challenges.
IT productivity skyrocketed, with Sportsman’s Warehouse engineers relieved from day-to-day maintenance and instead empowered to focus on strategic initiatives and innovations.
Operational efficiency improved, with centralized network management through a uniform network stack, and enhanced visibility through a single pane of glass.
The solution also incorporated elements that offered complete flexibility in providing optimized and secure access to applications, regardless of where they were hosted. In addition, this inherent flexibility meant that Sportsman’s could re-design their application infrastructure if business objectives changed over time, while the solution easily supports the design changes with minimal disruption.
Customer Benefits
The Hughes SD-WAN solution transitioned a manual, maintenance-heavy MPLS network into a scalable, strategic asset for Sportsman’s Warehouse. By enabling the retailer to do more with less, they have experienced these benefits:
- Freeing up valuable internal resources to focus on innovation, customers experience, and growth
- Ability to scale and providing complete flexibility with reliability as the IT infrastructure evolves and business objections change
- Cost savings through lower network management costs and increased service quality and value
By fully managing the deployment and operation of networking hardware and services, Hughes not only improved uptime and visibility but delivered tangible ROI through IT staff optimization and cost reduction.
Hughes Technology
To modernize the Sportsman’s Warehouse network, Hughes partnered with industry leaders to deliver a fully managed SD-WAN solution that combines performance, security, and future-ready flexibility:
- VeloCloud SD-WAN appliances paired with Hughes managed gateways and Cisco Meraki firewalls for granular optimization and security.
- Ericsson Enterprise Wireless (formerly Cradlepoint) 5G modems for high-availability backup to the primary wireline transport, providing connectivity resilience for critical applications.
- Hughes Managed Firewall, Switching, and Wi-Fi services on the unified Meraki platform, as well as access to the HughesON Portal, for network visibility, operations, and case management through a unified platform.
Learn more about Hughes Managed SD-WAN.