Spar Austria aims to operate its digital services on a uniform platform. To this end, the group’s in-house IT department Spar ICS has set up project Snowball. It is set to migrate business-critical applications to the geo-redundant Platform as a Service (PaaS) HPE Greenlake. The cloud platform from Hewlett Packard Enterprise will gradually replace Spar’s existing data centre infrastructure. The CIO Magazin reported on this.
The company wants to provide standardised IT services to its international locations and thus become more agile. Andreas Kranabitl is convinced that Project Snowball will also increase systems resilience. The managing director of Spar ICS explained: “The new digital platform will be highly available, highly dynamic, highly secure, and provide virtually unlimited performance.”
The new platform will also make it easier to implement EU’s cybersecurity requirements. According to Andreas Kranabitl, the overall goal is to “create an ‘evergreen’ business service platform that can meet all future requirements and ensure the continuous development of Spar’s digital capabilities.”
Cloud provides IT resources based on consumption
Spar Austria’s digital services include self-checkouts in stores and an app-based loyalty program. In addition, the company is introducing electronic shelf labels from Vusion. Spar aims to optimise customer flow by tracking shopping carts. In future, robots will perform stock-taking. The platform will provide store managers with dashboards that deliver real-time information on sales, orders and deliveries.
HPE’s Greenlake environment allows users to utilise IT resources such as computing power, storage, network and certain applications on usage-based payment and manage them centrally. Spar has signed a multi-year agreement with HPE for use of its server and storage systems. The technology vendor also provides network components and security solutions. The HPE Morpheus Enterprise orchestration platform and HPE OpsRamp IT operations management solution care for IT operations.
HPE delivers professional services
Spar has used HPE’s advisory and professional services for design, implementation, application evaluation, and change management as part of the Snowball project. The technology vendor’s experts also handle 24-hour operation of the platform.
Collaboration with the IT service provider is not new for Spar Austria. Back in 2021, Spar ICS migrated its Oracle database environment from the existing Oracle Exadata infrastructure to the HPE Greenlake Edge-to-Cloud solution. The company kept the actual Oracle databases in operation, as they were deeply rooted in Spar’s daily business.
