Cambridge Clothing

When you’ve been in the rag trade for over 140 years, it’s fair to say you know your stuff.

In an industry known for fickle fads, menswear manufacturer Cambridge Clothing has proven itself as a strong competitive contender, insightful enough to meet the market rather than simply chasing trends.

It was this legacy of insight that saw Auckland-based Cambridge Clothing turn to Kordia to fix its trans-Tasman communication problems.

“Cambridge Clothing recognised early on that trade with Australia was a pathway to the future,” says Jannine Wilkinson, Account Director at Kordia. “Entering the trans-Tasman market over 30-years ago, Cambridge has become an integrated Australasian business with most of the design, sales and marketing functions taking place in Melbourne.”

With a rapidly burgeoning trans-Tasman business, Cambridge executives and staff needed to be able to stay in regular contact with their colleagues over the ditch. The most cost-effective way was via video conferencing.

“The existing service was just not delivering,” says Wilkinson. “Significant latency, poor voice and picture quality meant that ‘real-time’ meetings between the Auckland and Melbourne teams were frustrating and time-consuming. The technology was failing its principal objective: to enable better business productivity."

So Andrew Mitchell, IT Manager for Cambridge Clothing, called Kordia. By September 2010, Cambridge Clothing had switched over to OnKor; Kordia’s fully-managed IP network solution.

“OnKor delivered a startling video-conferencing experience from day one,” says Mitchell. “The whole team was amazing, especially the guys working night and day to sort out our router issues—which weren’t even part of the OnKor deployment!”

Already a recipient of an industry innovation award, OnKor is a managed virtual private network (VPN) service that not only unlocks application limitations, but also provides a level of network visibility not available from incumbent suppliers.

“To say that I am thrilled is an understatement,” Mitchell concludes. “Because both the video-conferencing and the mainframe server run off the same network, we were hesitant about doing any upgrade that could result in an outage.

“But once OnKor was in, we knew we needn’t have worried.”