Austrian retailer SPAR launched in 1954 and grew in the 1970s when it combined with several regional wholesalers to create SPAR Austria AG. Today, the privately held company is a market leader, operating food retail, sports retail, and shopping center businesses across eight European countries. SPAR is the largest private Austrian employer with more than 91,300 team members, over 3,000 stores, and sales exceeding €18.63 billion.
SPAR continued to innovate to keep up with the evolution of the retail industry, but it faced challenges as consumers grew increasingly reliant on technology. Its multiple businesses had varying technical capabilities, and SPAR’s IT team was largely reactive, bogged down by network maintenance. The team had little time to create new services to support the online buying experience and changing consumer behavior.
Virtualization Enables Innovation, Reduces Costs
SPAR worked with Hitachi Vantara to modernize its network. Already reliant on VMware, the company wanted to extend its virtualization capabilities to improve service provisioning, reduce costs, and simplify management. SPAR adopted a private cloud solution from Hitachi with managed services provided by Axians, a Hitachi TrueNorth Partner.
The company chose the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for VMware vSphere. SPAR deployed two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1000 and two VSP G200 systems running Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System with global-active device.
The Hitachi UCP solution enables SPAR to access and scale its compute, storage, and network capacity as needed. Choosing from a service catalog, SPAR can deploy applications and services on virtual servers using automated provisioning and orchestration. Automated, flexible service provisioning reduces errors and delay, so the company can be more agile and responsive to market demands.
System Refresh Becomes a Competitive Advantage
The updated network has freed the IT team from administrative tasks, enabling them to work with business units to create innovative services that support social media promotions and omni-channel retailing. New services can be introduced in hours rather than days, and business applications can be launched in just two days, rather than 10 weeks.
The managed services and consumption-based payment model essentially eliminated SPAR’s capital expenses, shifting costs to operational expenditures. SPAR’s digital transformation enables its companies to offer more services and respond quickly to business needs, giving it a clear edge in the highly competitive retail industry.
Read the complete customer profile.
Find out more about Axians.
Image credit: Hitachi Vantara