DEVOPSdigest

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.

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 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."

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."