Platform9 joined Intel's Open Retail Initiative (ORI) and
launched a new software-defined store solution. Designed to help retailers
accelerate the rollout of store applications and improve digital experiences
for consumers, Platform9's new retail solution enables retailers to centrally
manage store IT with a converged infrastructure stack.
Platform9 Joins Intel Initiative
Intel's Open Retail Initiative (ORI) is a collaborative community
of organizations using open-source projects and vendor-proprietary solutions to
drive digital transformation in retail. The ORI's mission is to enable retail
transformation using open source, edge/IoT, and ISV ecosystem
applications.
"The ORI's commitment to open standards and industry collaboration
aligns well with Platform9's vision of delivering open source as a service on
any infrastructure and enabling retailers to accelerate their software driven
store initiatives," said John Jamie, VP
Marketing at Platform9.
Platform9 Launches Retail Solution to Simplify Store IT
Infrastructure and Application Management at Scale
Platform9 launched its software-defined store solution designed to
help retailers accelerate the deployment and management of the applications
that support store consumer digital experiences. The solution now enables
retailers to run a converged infrastructure stack in store - transforming each
store into a software-defined mini-cloud which then abstracts 1000s of
geographically distributed regions and stores into a single shared global
cloud.
With the introduction of KubeVirt support (KubeVirt enables VMs to
run on Kubernetes), the solution allows retailers to manage both containers and
virtual machines with a cloud-native approach. Retailers can also ensure
clusters are set up in an identical way across stores with the Platform9
Profile Engine, a new cluster governance and policy management feature.
Additionally, retailer DevOps teams are able to leverage CI/CD tooling, APIs,
and an app catalog to simplify application management at scale.
Provided as a fully-managed SaaS service, Platform9's retail
offering is backed by cloud experts who offer 24/7 proactive support.
"Consumers have come to expect an integrated, omnichannel digital
retail experience in stores, at the curbside and online," said Sirish Raghuram, CEO of
Platform9. "Many of these applications must run inside stores, due to latency,
bandwidth, or uptime considerations. Running this mix of traditional and modern
apps across a store network with a distributed cloud-native architecture is
uniquely supported by our technology. And equally important, with Platform9,
retailers enjoy a managed solution with 24/7 support."
Platform9 Releases Retail Store Solution Architecture White
Paper
Based on
its experience deploying large-scale retail store solutions, Platform9 has also
published a white paper providing a reference architecture that retailers can
use for their own use cases. Titled "Enabling the Software-Driven Store: Solution
Architecture for Cloud-Native Infrastructure and Operations,"
retailers can learn how to:
- Deploy
and centrally manage any type of workload - containers, VMs, or bare metal
- across all of their store locations, data centers, and public clouds
- Leverage
a centrally deployed management plane orchestrates the delivery of various
capabilities - containers, hypervisors, storage backends, network backends
- to physical infrastructure using automation and operational tools
"As
a pilot for our retail solution, Platform9 helped one of the world's largest
coffee chains use DevOps automation and CI/CD tool chains to centrally and
automatically deploy applications such as order management, video surveillance,
and music delivery to thousands of their coffee stores," continued CEO Sirish
Raghuram. "At the end of the day, they chose us because we could accelerate
their ability to deploy innovative applications with both a faster time to
market than building an internal solution, and a lower TCO than using other
commercial solutions which were not architected for distributed retail
environments."