Anna's Linens Drives IT Efficiency By Transitioning Stores From Traditional Phones To Voice Over IP

In 1987, Alan Gladstone opened the first Anna’s Linens store in California, naming it after his mother. Today, Anna’s Linens continues to be family run and operated even as it has expanded to 310 stores in 19 states plus Puerto Rico.

The discount luxury home textiles and décor business is known for high- quality products at affordable prices with high-touch customer service. As Anna’s Linens expanded nationwide, the company turned to technology to help manage stores remotely and efficiently, and to keep the stores, offices, distribution centers, and above all its customers, connected.

“Data and voice communications are the bloodline of our business,” said Harrison Kang, Vice President of IT, Anna’s Linens “We can’t operate our stores, offices and distribution centers without them.”

Anna’s Linens relies on the network to extend services to stores while keeping IT management centralized – a model that keeps complexity and cost down. With a growing nationwide footprint, Anna’s Linens was pushing the limits of its network and found it lacked the bandwidth to continue adding applications and stores. Managing phone systems at each store was also a challenge, as it was difficult to troubleshoot and didn’t provide for economies of scale or the ability to make agile global changes.

Anna’s needed a way to effectively manage voice changes and standardize on a single platform. Integrating voice and data provided an opportunity to justify a network upgrade and simplify management, but the company had concerns about reliability.

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