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Newsagent Martin McColl signs £4m VPN contract
That's a whole lot of Daily Mails

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Wednesday 25 June 2008

Newsagent Martin McColl has signed a £4m contract with comms specialist Azzurri for an enterprise-wide IP VPN.

The network will connect the retailer's 1,300-store estate and a number of third party suppliers, which provide services such as mobile phone top-ups, gift cards and its merchant acquirer.

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According to Martin McColl general manager for IT, Neil Hodge, the system upgrade is intended to improve the reliability of the network, which is a collection of dial-up connections, provide adequate connectivity for video media downloads for EPOS signage and upload more up-to-the-minute sales data to head office.

Previously, the retailer was operating overnight polling of sales data.

He said: "We had hit a brick wall with our current network."

The contract with Azzuri, which operates its own data network, will last for five years and is part of a wider upgrade to store systems throughout the Martin McColl estate. Alongside the network upgrade, the EPOS system has been integrated with e-top-up facilities into a single terminal.

The retailer has implemented the Azzuri VPN into a pilot store this week and full rollout will be completed by April next year.