VMware Helps Retailers Digitally Transform Brand Experiences to Enable Intelligent Stores

Chemist Warehouse, Chow Sang Sang, Migros and OFS Highlight How They Have Improved Customer and Employee Experiences with VMware Retail Solutions

This week at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual show, VMware, Inc., a leading innovator in enterprise software, showcased how several customers – including Chemist Warehouse, Chow Sang Sang, Migros and OFS – are partnering with the company to build a digital foundation for modern retail experiences.

In the highly competitive and dynamic retail industry, technology drives almost every step of the retail experience – in-store, warehouses, supply chain, and back offices. VMware Retail Solutions evolve legacy retail infrastructure into modern digital foundations with mobile workflows that can significantly increase customer satisfaction and workforce productivity. With VMware, retailers customize engagement while improving IT efficiency, agility, and performance from core to cloud to edge.

Accelerate Retail IT Delivery

Modern IT powers exceptional customer experiences. By speeding digital and in-store service delivery and reducing complexity, VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) solutions empower retailers to improve processes from checkout to supply chain management. Flexible, more secure, and cloud-ready digital infrastructure from VMware improves operational models to help create frictionless retail environments that can accelerate innovation and grow revenue.

Chemist Warehouse is a provider of pharmaceuticals, health, and beauty products and one of the largest retailers in Australia with over 500 locations within Australia and New Zealand. Like many growing retailers, Chemist Warehouse needed to modernize its IT infrastructure in order to keep up with the speed and scale of the business. The company worked with VMware to virtualize its compute, storage and networking infrastructure with VMware’s suite of SDDC solutions. In doing so, Chemist Warehouse unified and automated these IT environments with the same architectural structure extending from the data center to the pharmacy floor.

“We are committed to finding new and exciting ways to engage customers at every touchpoint – from the moment they walk into a store until they walk out, and beyond,” said Simon Hibbert, General Manager of IT at Chemist Warehouse Group. “The higher levels of standardization and automation achieved through virtualization enabled our team improve the agility and performance of our operations. This optimization ultimately helps us deliver solutions which allow our staff to focus on our customer rather than technology. The VMware portfolio has been instrumental in our agility and has allowed us to scale our store base and offering globally.”

Chow Sang Sang a premier jewelry retailer in Greater China currently has a retail network of more than 600 stores across the region. To stay at the forefront of the industry, Chow Sang Sang operates a dynamic e-commerce strategy across multiple channels including its online storefront – chowsangsang.com. Its online business created a significant new revenue stream, but also drove such a surge in demand that its legacy IT infrastructure was unable to support. Chow Sang Sang required a massive scale of transformation, from underlying infrastructure and hardware to storage and software.

VMware SDDC and VMware Enterprise PKS solutions on Dell EMC VxRail suited its IT transformation and development requirements. VMware SDDC solutions provide the ideal architecture for private, public, and hybrid clouds while VMware Enterprise PKS dynamically and more securely automates Kubernetes-based containerized applications in multi-cloud environments. With built-in critical production capabilities such as high availability, auto-scaling, health checks and self-healing, VMware Enterprise PKS optimizes computing resources among applications to maintain their desired state. This helps better enable the high availability of Chow Sang Sang’s e-commerce applications. Finally, running on the pre-tested and fully-integrated Dell EMC VxRail, Chow Sang Sang no longer worries about compatibility, reliability and performance issues.

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Empower the Retail Workforce and Drive Exceptional Customer Experiences

Today’s shoppers demand personalized, anytime, anywhere experiences. With VMware solutions, retailers can quickly deliver sales and inventory applications, marketing promotions, and customer service tools to any device, running any operating system seamlessly while enabling more secure, remote access to information. By transforming shopping experiences with robust service delivery everywhere—at endpoints, in stores, and beyond—VMware helps nurture brand loyalty.

Migros is one of the largest supermarket chains in Turkey with a presence in more than 81 cities across the country. The company aims to meet customer demands fast by reaching them through various channels according to their lifestyles and to help them have a unique shopping experience. In order to achieve this, Migros employees needed a way to access data on products and stock anytime and anywhere in a secure way.

The company partnered with VMware to implement VMware Workspace ONE, a digital workspace platform that manages and better secures all devices such as handheld terminals, tablets used by store associates and employee-owned mobile devices. Migros has eliminated many complexities associated with endpoint management across all platforms as well as leveraged a single platform to manage all apps and devices, regardless if the device is company- or employee-owned. In addition to providing employees with choice and flexibility, Migros has also experienced efficiency gains when it comes to software and application delivery and management.

“Thanks to Workspace ONE, the software updates that used to take weeks, are now smoothly completed in an hour. This has led to a substantial decrease in the number of IT support calls and a substantial increase in internal customer satisfaction,” explained Murat Zobu, IT infrastructure and operational system manager, Migros.

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Better Protect Retail Data and Brand

Cybercriminals actively target retail businesses to steal valuable customer financial information. With VMware Carbon Black, retailers can better protect their increasingly perimeter-less environments, including data centers, customer systems, and endpoints, with purpose-built, multi-layered security that better protects customer data.

OFS is a family-owned contract furniture manufacturer based in Huntingburg, Indiana and operates retail showrooms in eight cities across the U.S. After the IT team found itself spending too much time responding to false positive threat alerts and less time identifying and remediating legitimate threats, the company decided it was time for a new security solution.

With VMware Carbon Black, OFS transformed and improved its backend technology with a security-centric focus, enabling the company to confidently and swiftly deliver their products and services. VMware Carbon Black’s cloud-based endpoint protection platform (EPP), coupled with VMware Carbon Black’s managed alert monitoring and triage services, provides OFS with the expert threat validation its leadership team needs. For the OFS IT team, the time spent responding to alerts and malware has decreased significantly since using VMware Carbon Black.

Jeremy Wilkins, security technology administrator at OFS, explained, “Our time to value with VMware Carbon Black was almost instantaneous. I’m spending less time tracking down false positives, and spending more time triaging and acting on legitimate threats. We don’t bog down our internal network with legacy virus updates.”

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