InterDent Service Corporation, headquartered in Inglewood, California, is a leading dental service organization (DSO). It provides full-service business and administrative support to dental practices so that dentists can focus on delivering high-quality clinical care and patient satisfaction. The firm has roughly 3,000 employees and supports nearly 500 dentists at almost 200 practice locations and mobile sites, with major hubs in Inglewood, Vancouver, Washington, and Salem, Oregon, plus three call centers. It also serves the state-managed Oregon Health Plan with mobile clinics.

InterDent relies on its infrastructure to keep business and administrative services running so providers can focus on patients. Over the past decade the organization added many dental offices through affiliations and de novo openings, leaving it with a very diverse mix of interconnectivity devices. When CIO Bernard Piccione joined two years earlier, he found legacy connectivity technologies and plain old telephone service (POTS) lines, switches and routers from seemingly every vendor, offices running their own phone systems, and an aging unified communications platform with two call centers.

The environment was complex to manage and service was inconsistent. "We had to manage each circuit for each clinic in each location," said Piccione. A rotating mix of practice managers and providers meant IT occasionally lacked visibility into individual practices, and the organization was experiencing a lot of downtime. When a circuit failed, InterDent had to contact the local provider's technical teams, work with legacy vendors and coordinate troubleshooting with practice managers, regional clinics and other stakeholders.

The hub-and-spoke design, with firewalls in the data center and all internet and VPN traffic backhauled there, was difficult to scale for nearly 200 locations, especially with large-file applications such as 3D imaging. InterDent needed a solution that was simpler to manage and provided the performance, security and scalability its providers needed.

InterDent considered several technology partners and chose Mosaic NetworX, a managed service provider that delivers fully managed SD-WAN as a Service with diverse internet connectivity, backed by a strategic deployment plan. Mosaic presented a fully managed solution combining a diverse network, VMware SD-WAN, wireless 4G backup and cloud-based security under one managed platform. According to Peter Herschkorn, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Mosaic NetworX, disciplined discovery work enabled a design plan that met InterDent's technical needs and project timelines.

InterDent migrated to VMware SD-WAN across all its sites, deploying 192 VMware SD-WAN Edge devices plus an Edge configured in high-availability mode in the main data center, with three major hubs in Inglewood, Vancouver and Salem and support for three call centers. Most sites now use dual broadband connections and dedicated internet access (DIA); select locations use DIA with single-circuit links. LTE provides backup failover for VoIP calls, and satellite microwave and fixed wireless serve a few remote sites. Mobile dental vans use VMware SD-WAN Edge 610 devices on a mesh network, so traffic is not hauled back to the data center.

Mosaic's White Glove process shipped edge devices to Mosaic first for pre-configuration before deployment, rather than asking the customer to plug in and configure devices, ensuring seamless activation at each site. For security, the SD-WAN architecture was paired with Zscaler cloud security and VMware firewalls, so internet traffic is offloaded at the local office instead of backhauled through data-center firewalls. Mosaic's in-house network operations center is available 24x7x365, with an escalation path from its head of engineering and technology to company executives.

• 192 VMware SD-WAN Edge devices deployed across nearly 200 practice locations, plus a high-availability edge in the main data center
• All POTS lines eliminated, including lines for credit card, fax and alarm systems, delivering a significant return on investment
• Downtime dramatically reduced after years of lost productivity and revenue from legacy connectivity and local outages
• Two years' worth of upgrades completed in one year, including 22 offices migrated to VoIP and one standard build per location
• Local internet breakout with Zscaler and VMware firewalls replaced a hub-and-spoke design that was difficult to scale to nearly 200 locations
• Visualization and proactive alerting let IT focus on business initiatives rather than connectivity troubleshooting