Drakes Supermarkets has teamed up with enterprise cloud software company Nutanix to replace the independent retailer’s ageing IT environment with new infrastructure, as it responds to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Drakes worked with Nutanix and Adelaide-based IT partner Nuago to help support Drakes’ $125 million automated distribution centre, including its robotics technology, warehouse management, point of sales and enterprise resource planning systems.
“We’ve seen our warehousing and IT requirements more than double in the past few weeks, but we’ve maintained 100 per cent availability across all of our systems,” said Drakes IT manager Phillip Romano.
“We can now focus on taking care of our communities’ shopping needs, getting those staff who can do to work remotely, and hire new staff directly from the increasing pool of unemployed Australians.”
Drakes now aims to expand the Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure across all stores and wholesale arms, as well as leverage the Nutanix XI IoT edge intelligence platform, which uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time data insights. It also features video analytics to provide personalised experiences for customers.
“While consumers are currently flooding into supermarkets, the retail industry as a whole continues to experience unprecedented levels of pressure, competition and consolidation,” said Romano.
“To remain competitive and retain customer loyalty, we need to drive efficiency and create personalised experiences. We see Nutanix and Nuago as key to building the technology and infrastructure we need to do that.”
