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Alcatel Provides Highly Available and Secure Wired and Wireless Enterprise Network for #1 Regional Grocery Chain Food City

Posted on: Wednesday, 15 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

CALABASAS, Calif., Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Alcatel today announced that K-VA-T Food Stores Inc., operator of the 88-store Food City grocery chain, has selected Alcatel's wired and wireless enterprise network solutions to build a secure, high-availability network that enables mission-critical applications at its headquarters and retail locations.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20031111/ALALOGO)

Headquartered in Abingdon, VA, the Food City grocery chain is number one in sales in the tri-state region of Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee and employs more than 10,000 employees. The company has built a backbone for its headquarters and distribution center to centralize network resources with Alcatel's OmniSwitch and OmniStack solutions and is providing secure wireless connectivity at its stores with Alcatel's OmniAccess WLAN solution.

"With this network, we are able to automate our supply chain and make the company much more competitive, but this raises the stakes on our network and means it has to be transparent to the users," said Guido Ontaneda, Director of Technical Services for K-VA-T Food Stores. "Alcatel offered us the security, availability and mobility capabilities we needed and the project has exceeded our expectations."

Food City's Alcatel network is the foundation for a computerized, voice-activated order-selecting application that has virtually eliminated order fulfillment errors and resulted in significant cost savings. With more than 100 workers depending on the system around the clock, Ontaneda said the OmniSwitch 7800's Gigabit meshed fiber, redundant power and chassis management features help ensure continuous operation.

Key to Food City's bottom line is the challenge of quickly adjusting pricing to economic conditions and fluctuating supplier costs. Alcatel OmniSwitch is allowing Food City to meet these challenges by providing the network uptime needed to support a completely centralized pricing application that pushes out weekly pricing changes to stores and cash registers. This mission-critical process involves an extensive analysis of supplier costs and regional pricing trends and an entire team of Food City pricing experts that rely on the network.

Alcatel enterprise solutions are solving another pricing challenge that Food City faces in its retail stores -- distributing pricing information to areas that the wired network cannot reach. Using the OmniAccess WLAN range, Food City can now automatically push pricing information to semi-portable scales in its Bakery and Deli departments or any other hard-to-reach area. Ontaneda said the company chose Alcatel's OmniAccess WLAN solution because its advanced security allows Food City to centrally authenticate each device and prevent tampering.

The backbone network also uses Alcatel's authenticated virtual LAN (AVLAN) technology to provide powerful security for controlled network access, allowing Food City to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) for pharmacy data stored on servers at the headquarters.

"Alcatel's wired and wireless enterprise solutions are ideal in fast moving, highly-competitive industries like retail," said Tom Burns, senior vice president and general manager, Alcatel Network Infrastructure Business activities. "Our enterprise networking solutions allow customers to handle business transactions securely and without interruption and pass on the value they obtain from Alcatel to their customers."

About Alcatel

Alcatel provides communications solutions to telecommunication carriers, Internet service providers and enterprises for delivery of voice, data and video applications to their customers or to their employees. Alcatel leverages its leading position in fixed and mobile broadband networks, applications and services to bring value to its customers in the framework of a broadband world. With sales of EURO 12.5 billion in 2003, Alcatel operates in more than 130 countries. For more information, visit Alcatel on the Internet: http://www.alcatel.com/

Alcatel Press Contact

Ed Essa, +1-818-878-5472, ed.essa@ind.alcatel.com

Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20031111/ALALOGOAP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org/PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.com

Alcatel

CONTACT: Ed Essa of Alcatel, +1-818-878-5472, ed.essa@ind.alcatel.com

Web site: http://www.alcatel.com/

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