Matrix Service Company

After struggling with its legacy wireless networking solution, Matrix Service Company, a North American engineering and construction contractor to the energy and industrial markets, decided a networking refresh was key to meeting its operational and competitive goals.

"When we're awarded a project, it can often require rapidly establishing project offices at the customer's site and providing connectivity for hundreds of construction professionals," explains Rick Bennett, CIO for the Tulsa, Oklahoma-headquartered company. "Our existing solution couldn't keep up with our evolving agility, scalability, and performance demands."

Aruba's AI-Enabled Innovations and Automation Outshine the Rest

As a prominent service provider to some of the most well-known energy and industrial companies, Matrix maintains office locations in the U.S., Canada and Australia; manufacturing facilities in Oklahoma and South Korea; and project sites throughout North America.

With each project site serving as a branch office for the duration of an engagement, depending upon the project, IT infrastructure installations can range from months to a few years. "Regardless of the project scope and size, all require reliable, secure, high-performance access for CAD and other engineering applications," says Bennett.

Seeking a wired, wireless, and branch networking solution that was easily upgraded and scaled to accommodate expanding needs, Matrix considered several options before selecting Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. "We were impressed with Aruba's innovative AI-enabled solutions, with automation capabilities for proactive and streamlined management," says Bennett.

Overall, Matrix estimated Aruba's Edge Services Platform (ESP) would provide a 30 percent reduction in five-year lifecycle costs vs. retaining its existing system. "In addition, the savings from purchasing Aruba solutions suggested we could achieve break even within 18 months when compared to what we would have spent with our previous vendor, while gaining significant new capabilities," Bennett says. "This benefits both our company and our clients."

Building on its Aruba ESP Foundation

To build on its Aruba ESP foundation, Matrix chose corporate and SD-Branch hardware comprised of Aruba's 530 Series Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs), 9000 Series LTE Branch Gateways, CX 6400 Switch Series for core switches, and CX 6300 Switch Series for access and aggregation.

Software solutions include cloud-native Aruba Central to unify AP, gateway and switch management, with Aruba ClearPass providing unified network access control and User Experience Insight (UXI) supplying continuous real-time performance insights from a user and device perspective.

Although the evaluation process began well before the COVID-19 pandemic, adoption proved otherwise. Matrix worked closely with local partner SageNet to leverage the ensuing economic pause to speed deployment.

"It's a testament to Aruba that we closed the contract quickly and received products rapidly," Bennett says. "This allowed us to start replacing our legacy solution with minimal disruption while the majority of our staff was working remotely."

Agile, Scalable and Cost-Effective SD-Branch

For its project locations, Matrix relies on the flexibility of its Aruba SD-Branch solution to adapt dynamically.

"We can commission, scale, decommission and re-purpose components, without a forklift update to our branch networking equipment," says Bennett. "This allows us to better manage our budgets and also permits deploying and managing branches effectively with a very lean IT team."

Benefiting from Aruba Central and AIOps

Branch implementations and management are accomplished using Central for streamlined operations, such as zero-touch provisioning, and Aruba AIOps for network self-optimization. This includes Aruba's unique AIOps approach, which preempts network problems by combining network and user-centric data with machine learning and anonymous data gathered from millions of devices throughout its worldwide customer base.

"We're excited about using the full breadth of Central, including the analytics and monitoring supplied by Aruba's AIOps capabilities," Bennett says.

LTE Gateways to deliver 60% telecommunications savings

Contributing to agility and savings are Matrix's new LTE gateways, configured and managed with Central, which allow for using the most cost-effective available telecommunications connection, such as local Internet services.

Additionally, the LTE gateways reduce cellular-related hardware costs. "Where cellular is the best connection option, we no longer need an LTE modem because each Aruba branch gateway includes dual carrier SIM support," says Bennett.

Previously, branch deployments were complex and inflexible, resulting in higher costs. For example, networking equipment at a large project site that typically required a telecommunications connection would be too costly to re-deploy at smaller sites. "In those instances we would had to have purchased a multi-year MPLS contract for a smaller site in order to support the re-deployed equipment, which was unacceptable," Bennett says.

Once Matrix has fully transitioned all of its locations to Aruba, the company estimates it will cut telecommunications costs by 60 percent, while enabling faster circuit delivery and boosting access speeds.

Enhanced and Unified Security with a Robust Zero-Trust Approach

Matrix is also enhancing and unifying security by adopting zero-trust capabilities that include a combination of Aruba solutions.

"Our new network contributes to a series of cybersecurity initiatives we're pursuing," Bennett says.

Security and productivity goals achieved with Central's third party integration

As a revolution in zero-trust enforced, Matrix's new gateways forward all traffic within a branch to a gateway for deep packet inspection (DPI) by a firewall.

In Matrix's case, its long-term firewall partner is Zscaler. Because Aruba integrates so tightly with applications like Zscaler, IT staff simply use Central's drop-down menus to quickly configure the partner solution appropriately.

"Aruba's advanced Zscaler integration allowed us to move forward swiftly without the need for new firewalls or added VPN concentrators," says Bennett.

Dynamic Segmentation helps secure endpoints while reducing complexity

Matrix also appreciates Aruba's Dynamic Segmentation feature for reducing numerous VLANs to a single VLAN deployment.

This reduces networking complexity, adds the ability to dynamically route traffic, and permits isolating endpoints – whether laptops or facility access controls – while also stopping any malicious activity.

Combining Aruba ClearPass with Microsoft Intune rounds out the security picture

To further increase security, Matrix establishes and manages enterprise-wide user and device policies within ClearPass. In turn, ClearPass smoothly integrates with Matrix's endpoint manager Microsoft Intune.

"Combining ClearPass with Intune not only improves security, it also smooths device procurement and onboarding," Bennett says. "It permits shipping corporate-issued devices directly to a project site, where users securely connect them with a few clicks."

Smart, Programmable Wired Network with Aruba CX from Core to Edge

From a wired networking perspective, Matrix is taking advantage of the Aruba CX Switch platform to simplify and modernize. Powered by the AOS-CX cloud-centric, fully programmable operating system, the platform provides easy-to-use configuration tools and the Aruba Network Analytics Engine (NAE) for real-time monitoring and fast troubleshooting.

The solution includes a CX 6400 core switch at each of Matrix's two geographically-dispersed data centers, providing scalable, non-blocking performance with spine-leaf architecture and EVPN-VXLAN fabric that supports speeds of up to 100GbE and multi-gigabit Ethernet.

For the access and aggregation layers, Matrix's CX 6300M switches furnish built-in high-speed uplinks and field-replaceable, hot-swappable components for non-disruptive high availability.

"In addition to offering considerable operational benefits, Aruba's CX Switches have a lower price per port than our legacy solution, Bennett says.

User Experience Insight for AI-powered awareness

Due to its reliance on Microsoft Teams, Office 365 and other cloud-delivered applications for workforce and client interactions, Matrix is also deploying Aruba's User Experience Insight (UXI) sensors, which continuously monitors network connections from a user and device perspective.

"UXI enables us to understand local user and device experiences from a centralized dashboard," says Bennett. "We can identify the root cause, whether its Internet connectivity, DHCP, DNS, a gateway, a switch or an AP."

"This ensures we can trace problems to their source as well as build performance benchmarks to proactively identify potential issues," he adds.

Seamlessly Collaborating across Corporate, Branch and Remote Locations

Today, Matrix values the proven networking infrastructure supporting its Microsoft Teams-driven environment. "For years we had daily issues with audio and video quality using our legacy network and web conferencing solutions," says Bennett. "However, we lacked the appropriate tools to identify and resolve issues."

Now, that's all changed. With this new infrastructure at Matrix, Bennett says Teams has operated exceptionally well for all employees, whether they're in the office, remain working from home, or are at project location.

"In fact, our corporate network operates so smoothly and requires little IT attention, enabling us to concentrate on deploying our branch locations and completing other business-critical initiatives," he adds.

Evaluating RAPs for micro sites and WFH

Moving forward, Matrix will continue evaluating Aruba innovations, such as how Remote Access Points (RAPs) could facilitate ongoing WFH or more effectively serve small project sites.

Aruba RAPs maintain persistent VPN connectivity, with the same secure traffic routing and policy enforcement as on the physical network, while delivering remote and micro site employees a plug-and-play wireless and wired experience.

Core value alignment

Regardless of the solution or innovation at hand, the strong partnership developed between Matrix and Aruba ensures the company will have access to the latest developments.

"Aruba has worked hard to understand our business and, by doing so, has achieved partner status with us very quickly," says Bennett. "If our representatives feel there is something we should consider, we're going to listen."

What's more, Bennett's team is pleased with Aruba's enterprise support model, including expert engineers and a local parts depot, which their legacy solution lacked.

"Most importantly, we've experienced a level of integrity and customer focus from Aruba that is well-aligned with our company's own culture and core values," he continues. "We certainly value that."