Virgin Entertainment and Hannaford Bros. Co. Picks Cisco

Cisco Systems®, Inc. (www.cisco.com) announced that Virgin Entertainment Group, the world's leading multi-channel music and entertainment retailer, and Hannaford Bros. Co., with 147 supermarkets in the Northeast, have selected the Cisco Intelligent Retail Network to simplify store operations and create a more responsive organization, all while providing customers with an enhanced retail experience.

"Virgin Megastores are committed to using advanced technology to remain highly competitive. We chose the Cisco Intelligent Retail Network to enable us to offer our customers a wider and more dynamic range of services while giving us the tools to better manage our high-bandwidth applications," said Robert Fort, Director of Information Technology for Virgin Entertainment Group, North America.

Virgin Entertainment Group operates 18 Virgin Megastores in the United States that provide thousands of customers with experiential, interactive shopping through in-store appearances by major entertainment artists, a wide variety of music and DVD media and games, highly available store personnel and cutting-edge shopping technologies.

"Hannaford is a leading-edge, customer-oriented enterprise. We were looking for a solution that strongly reflected this to our employees and customers," said Ed Taggart, Manager, Network and Communications, Hannaford Bros. Co.

To help achieve this goal of offering the ultimate customer experience, Virgin Megastores was eager to improve its in-store Virgin Vault Kiosk listening stations by providing customer access to its vast library of music.

At the same time, the company wanted to upgrade its phone systems within its stores to reduce voice communications costs while increasing features and manageability. Additionally, Virgin Entertainment Group wanted a way to achieve better universal visibility into the status of each store's technologies.

With the Cisco Collaborative Communications solution, Virgin Megastore employees now have easy access to employee directories, advanced voicemail capabilities and other time-saving applications in addition to all of the features expected from a business phone.

Hannaford Bros. Co. has provided high-quality food and drug products to the public for more than 120 years with 147 supermarkets in the Northeast. Hannaford's network was already based on an end-to-end Cisco Intelligent Retail Network, designed on the principles of Cisco's Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) to accelerate applications, business processes and profitability for enterprises.

"Cisco is delighted to work with Virgin Entertainment and Hannaford Bros. Co. to deploy converged, centrally managed and secure Intelligent Retail Networks that can meet their needs today and in the future," said Ed Jimenez, Cisco's Worldwide Retail Industry and RFID Solution Manager.