When Australia’s largest theme park operator found itself needing to modernize an aging IT network, it turned to a software-defined wide area network solution, but ultimately confronted interoperability issues in its effort to transform enterprise operations.

“Interoperability is a major issue in the IT industry,” said Michael Fagan (pictured), chief transformation officer of Village Roadshow Ltd. “When I previously implemented an SD-WAN transformation, I had products from two tier-one vendors that just didn’t talk to one another. When kids grow up in Australia, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That’s what I want our team to be doing, delivering those great experiences, not trying to plug together bits of software that may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another.”

Fagan spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Ignite ’22, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the key elements behind his company’s comprehensive digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Embracing a converged solution

Village Roadshow became a user of Prisma SASE, a secure access service edge or SASE solution from Palo Alto Networks Inc. that converges network security, SD-WAN and autonomous digital management into one package.

“We had aging infrastructure, and our firewalls were end-of-life,” Fagan said. “We expanded to a full SD-WAN SASE implementation. Palo Alto Networks, with Prisma Access and GlobalProtect, was the only solution that gave us everything we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility we required.”

As Village Roadshow’s chief transformation officer, Fagan helps drive revenue and profitability across the company’s divisions. He realized that network modernization would be essential if the business was going to move forward in a post-pandemic world.

“Running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to do,” Fagan said. “If you haven’t looked at the network in the last two years and made changes, you’re out of date. The world has changed.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Ignite ’22:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Ignite ’22. Neither Palo Alto Networks Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE