Spar South Africa has announced that it is transforming its digital strategy to streamline its IT operations, and maintain a competitive edge in the local retail market.
As a part of the strategy, the retailer has deployed Microsoft Office 365, and the cloud computing service Microsoft Azure, to reduce its server footprint by a third.
It also aims to cut its virtual machine count by half in just two years.
'More Than Cutting Costs'
According to Greg Hay, group technology and operations executive at the Spar Group Ltd, this move is more than just cutting costs.
“The cloud gives us the flexibility and scalability we need to expand operations at will and not be constrained by the capacity limits of an on-premises IT infrastructure,” Hay said.
“At a tactical level, we’re using the Microsoft Cloud to implement practical steps that drastically reduce IT overhead and make us a nimbler company.”
Larger Transformation Plan
The move has resulted in reducing system set-up time from hours to minutes, and problems can now be resolved faster with access to Microsoft professional direct support.
The current push for efficiency is part of a larger digital transformation plan that includes moving key, on-premise IT workloads to the cloud.
© 2018 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Dayeeta Das. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
