How Avolta Future-Proofed IT for a Million Daily Transactions
In the retail and hospitality industries, every second of downtime means lost revenue, frustrated customers, and missed opportunities. For companies operating in high-traffic environments like airports, the stakes are even higher.
Avolta North America, operator of Hudson News and other global retail brands, recognized that its IT infrastructure was beginning to strain under the pressure of a million daily transactions. With more than 2,000 locations across the U.S. and Canada, the company recognized they need a more scalable, resilient foundation to support both today’s operations and tomorrow’s innovations.
Their goal: to unify systems, reduce risk, and ensure uninterrupted availability across every store and hospitality location.
Of course, bringing this vision to live came with its own set of obstacles to overcome. Managing IT across Avolta’s portfolio meant supporting a wide range of technologies: POS and payment systems, pay-at-table services, and digital engagement applications. Each of these had unique infrastructure requirements, creating added complexity and escalating support costs.
The challenges were compounded by the physical environments Avolta operates in. Airports and other secured locations limited physical access for IT teams, meaning outages couldn’t always be quickly resolved.
The Scale Computing Reliant Platform™: Unified, Resilient, and Flexible
To address these challenges, Avolta selected the Scale Computing Reliant Platform™ as the backbone of its retail modernization strategy. Built on Intel® architecture, the Reliant Platform delivered exactly what Avolta needed: high availability, unified application delivery, and flexibility across diverse retail and hospitality environments.
With support for both virtualization and containerization, the Reliant Platform would enable Avolta to:
- Run Windows VMs and Linux-based containers side by side for maximum compatibility.
- Eliminate fragmented appliances by consolidating workloads onto a single platform.
- Deploy applications quickly and consistently through both UI and API integrations.
- Ensure uptime with built-in redundancy and real-time failover, critical in locations where on-site troubleshooting isn’t always possible.
- Remain cloud-agnostic, reducing vendor lock-in and giving the company freedom to choose hardware, cloud, and application providers.
By consolidating these disparate systems into a single, retail-hardened platform, Avolta was able to significantly reduce its total cost of ownership and simplify its IT operations. Other key results included:
- Lower costs: Consolidation and virtualization reduced reliance on costly, single-purpose devices.
- Greater agility: The ability to virtualize and containerize workloads allowed for faster adoption of new applications while extending the lifespan of existing ones.
- Improved reliability: Automated failover and built-in redundancy ensured critical guest-facing systems remained online, even in high-traffic, restricted-access environments.
- Future-readiness: With an extensible architecture, Avolta is now positioned to seamlessly adopt new technologies, from emerging payment methods to expanded hospitality services.
By choosing Scale Computing’s Reliant Platform, Avolta ensured that its 2,000+ locations could operate with maximum reliability today while staying agile enough to support future growth and innovation.
Read the case study to learn more about how Avolta delivered innovation at scale.