Always On When It Matters Most: Barnes & Noble Education’s First-Day-of-Class Success
THE CHALLENGE
For Barnes & Noble Education (BNED), one of the largest contractual bookstore operators for colleges and K-12 institutions in the U.S., the first day of class is its “holiday season.” Through its BNC First Day® program, BNED ensures students have access to required course materials on day one, supporting academic success at scale.
That scale brings complexity. BNED must support peak demand periods across more than 1,100 locations, with transactions flowing seamlessly through in-store systems, order management platforms, and public cloud environments. Any disruption in connectivity, performance, or visibility could impact students, faculty, and institutions nationwide.
At the same time, as cloud adoption increased, BNED needed greater insight into cloud usage and costs to avoid unchecked growth and ensure technology investments aligned to business outcomes.
THE SOLUTION
BNED partnered with Presidio to design and support a highly dependable, always-on network architecture connecting its stores, systems, and public cloud platforms. Rather than leading with technology alone, Presidio focused first on BNED’s business drivers, and how technology needed to perform to support students, bookstores, and future growth.
Presidio also introduced BNED to the Presidio Prism™ program, delivering enhanced cloud cost visibility and optimization. With detailed insights into how cloud resources were being used – where, when, and by whom – BNED gained the data needed to fine-tune consumption and control spend.
Throughout the engagement, Presidio operated as a true business partner and trusted advisor, providing responsive support and freeing BNED’s teams to focus on strategic priorities.
Results & Benefits
- Always-on connectivity supporting mission-critical first-day-of-class transactions
- Improved performance and reliability across 1,100+ physical and virtual bookstores
- Month-over-month cloud cost savings driven by deeper usage visibility and optimization
- Stronger alignment with AWS, enabled through Presidio’s Prism program
- Greater confidence in the future, backed by a trusted, responsive technology partner
“One of the challenges with the future is the unknown. We often like the unknown, but it sometimes makes us a little bit uncomfortable. And having a trusted advisor such as Presidio there, someone we can call, it just makes the future that much better for us”
- David Brezee, VP, Chief Technology Officer
About Presidio
Presidio is a Global Digital Services And Solutions Provider accelerating business transformation by modernizing and securing our clients information technology.
For more information on how we connect IT of today to IT of tomorrow, visit presidio.com
