At Dick Hannah, business excellence and tech innovation go hand in hand.

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Brand Story – When Dick Hannah opened as a regional automotive seller in 1949, over 30 years earlier than the beginning of the web, know-how comprised a small a part of the corporate. Today, with 23 auto-related companies within the Portland metro space, it depends on a 17-person IT crew, knowledgeable companions and next-generation digital instruments to optimize the shopper and worker expertise.  

At first look, family-owned automotive enterprise and high-tech pioneer might sound like opposites, however with a purpose to increase and lead the business, Dick Hannah has realized to embody each. 

“The misconception is that, ‘It’s a dealership. What can they possibly be doing from a tech standpoint that’s interesting?’” explains Sean McKannay, CIO & Digital Marketing Director, Dick Hannah Dealerships. “But we have to integrate and work with the largest companies on the planet, while protecting a diverse network, delivering cloud services and supporting thousands of devices at the store level.” 

McKannay, who joined the group in 1998 and has helmed most of its know-how evolution, remembers his first purpose: ship a centralized web connection and facilitate collaboration as Dick Hannah continued increasing.

“From the beginning, we were always optimizing, eventually setting up simplified LAN [Local Area Network], then WAN [Wide Area Network],” McKannay provides. “Then voice and video started putting a lot of pressure on the WAN and our equipment.” 

In 2016, Dick Hannah determined it was time to consolidate and improve its community. It started reaching out to fiber community
suppliers, understanding that fiber could be the one infrastructure that might assist the group’s knowledge, velocity and reliability wants effectively into the long run. 

“Most companies could only cover a few of our locations,” McKannay says. “I wanted to see if someone could cover them all, so we didn’t have to go to four different carriers. I was shopping for our whole footprint.” 

At that time, Comcast Business had already established itself within the fiber business, recognizing it early on as a superior, sturdy know-how for maximum-speed connectivity. The group’s intensive fiber community nearly completely aligned with Dick Hannah’s wants. 

“And for the one or two businesses that didn’t fit, Comcast was willing to build fiber into those locations,” McKannay notes. “Comcast was able to absorb a lot of that cost up front, whereas other companies could not. Between them having a good fiber footprint, and being flexible on extending to and dealing with about a dozen remote physical buildings, going with them was an easy decision and really our ideal scenario.”

The price of constructing a fiber community can show prohibitive for firms, significantly when connecting new places. 

“Comcast Business is committed to investing in local businesses in the community like Dick Hannah,” explains Allison Lawr, Senior Enterprise Sales Manager, Comcast Business. “Comcast Business provides one dedicated project manager who manages all aspects of the project, from permitting to design to implementation. This allows a more streamlined approach for our clients and ultimately provides the best customer experience when going through a network change.”

Dick Hannah is presently working with Comcast Business, who’s once more managing and serving to soak up prices, to construct a second circuit right into a newly acquired Sandy, Oregon, location. 

The success of its preliminary fiber mission paved the best way for a long-term partnership that has seen Comcast Business work with Dick Hannah to ship SD-WAN: a software-defined large space community.

With the transfer to cloud environments, Dick Hannah’s places wanted full reliability, ultra-low latency and fault tolerance on the edge. In quick, it wanted SD-WAN. As McKannay was exploring the choices, Covid arrived, forcing its accounting workplace to do business from home, triggering the rise of voice-video functions and highlighting the need of optimizing community efficiency.

Dick Hannah grew to become one of many first firms within the space to make the most of Comcast Business’s SD-WAN service.

“SD-WAN implementations have a lot of moving parts. A particular challenge for this implementation was ensuring that all work was done behind the scenes and didn’t impact the employees or customers at their dealerships,” Lawr says. “Our project manager worked diligently to coordinate with the Dick Hannah team every step of the way to make sure that we met their deadlines, but also did not interrupt their day-to-day operations.”

All of Dick Hannah’s operations demand entry to its community: opening a restore order, making a telephone name, sending photographs or finishing cost transactions. Any interruption might introduce pricey points throughout a number of companies. 

“With past companies we worked with, updates meant decreased operational hours,” McKannay notes. “But Comcast Business has the resources to build a really good network up front. When they do upgrades on their side, we don’t end up with outages. That helps me deliver to our 1,200 employees.”

SD-WAN lets Dick Hannah optimize site visitors flows and enhance efficiency, at the same time as networks get hit with huge downloads and educational movies from automakers. For the IT crew, SD-WAN interprets into improved visibility and troubleshooting, whereas for workers, it guarantees seamless service at once.

“A lot of problems at the WAN edge went away almost completely. It reduced my expenses to add more to the bottom line,” McKannay displays. “It makes my department more efficient and better able to respond, and it allows for scalability.”

McKannay and his crew proceed to observe evolutions in know-how, evaluating how they’ll increase IT to learn its automotive companies, workers and finish prospects. At the identical time, Comcast Business continues upgrading its portfolio of providers to mirror new digital capabilities and company wants.

“Comcast Business services are designed to be flexible and adaptable, so we can keep pace with the changing needs of a growing organization like Dick Hannah,” Lawr concludes. “From cloud-based applications to advanced analytics and reporting, Comcast Business provides a suite of tools that can help large organizations stay ahead of the competition and reach their goals.”

Brand tales are paid content material articles that permit Oregon Business advertisers to share information about their organizations and interact with readers on enterprise and public coverage points.  The tales are produced in home by the Oregon Business advertising division. For extra info, contact affiliate writer Courtney Kutzman.