Independent Supermarket Chain Retains 100pc Availability as it Leads Community Efforts to Counter COVID-19
ADELAIDE, Australia – [23 April 2020] – Enterprise cloud OS leader, Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), today announced it is supporting Drakes Supermarkets as the organisation and communities it serves respond to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Family-owned and operated Drakes Supermarkets is the largest independent retailer grocer in Australia and the first to be vertically integrated. It operates more than 60 stores across South Australia and Queensland and employs more than 6,000 staff, a number that is rapidly increasing as the company strives to preserve local jobs and meet the sudden surge in consumer demand brought on by the pandemic.
Drakes worked with Nutanix and Adelaide-based IT partner, Nuago, to replace its ageing IT environment with Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). The new infrastructure now supports Drakes’ $125 million, state-of-the-art automated distribution centre in South Australia’s Edinburgh North, including its advanced robotics technology, warehouse management, point of sales (POS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems – enabling the retailer to access and respond to real-time stock demand.
The 50,000+ square metre facility and accompanying technology upgrade proved to be timely. “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 brought its distribution in-house and modernised its IT environment primarily to lower costs and pass those savings onto customers, with the aim of taking “$1,000 off the average family’s annual grocery bill,” according to CEO Roger Drake.
With Nutanix Proving its prowess and resilience during the current turbulent times, Drakes aims to expand the HCI environment across all stores and wholesale arms.
Longer term, Drakes aims to leverage the Nutanix Xi IoT edge intelligence platform – which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide real-time data insights – along with video analytics, to create new personalised experiences for customers. It is also considering migrating to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor to support Drakes’ 250 virtual machines (VMs).
“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.”
“Drakes understands the value of its data and the insight it gives into the purchasing profile of its customers. So, it makes perfect sense to ensure that proprietary information is internally retained,” said Lee Thompson, newly appointed Managing Director for ANZ, Nutanix. “By taking its distribution in-house, Drakes is taking control of its infrastructure and helping drive the future of retail.”
The recent Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index showed retailers in Australia and across the globe are pulling back data and applications from the public cloud to on-premises infrastructure, with hybrid cloud being the overarching preference for the industry as it seeks to modernise operations and maximise security.
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making computing invisible anywhere. Organisations around the world use Nutanix software to leverage a single platform to manage any app at any location at any scale for their private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.
© 2020 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo, and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This release may contain links to external websites that are not part of Nutanix.com. Nutanix does not control these sites and disclaims all responsibility for the content or accuracy of any external site. Our decision to link to an external site should not be considered an endorsement of any content on such a site.
Media Contacts:
Watterson (for Nutanix)
Oisín O’Callaghan
oisin.ocallaghan@watterson.com.au
+61 431 612 386
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