In convenience retail, uptime is everything. From fueling transactions to foodservice operations, even brief interruptions can impact revenue, frustrate guests, and undermine brand trust. For RaceTrac, a third-generation, family-owned company operating more than 775 RaceTrac and RaceWay stores across the Southeast, reliability is the foundation of the guest experience.
RaceTrac’s leadership recognized that its existing IT environment, built on a patchwork of single-purpose devices, was becoming a liability. Supporting rapid growth and delivering seamless service across hundreds of locations required a fresh approach. To modernize operations and prepare for the future, the company deployed the Scale Computing Reliant Platform™ Edge Computing as a Service as its next-generation edge solution.
Over time, RaceTrac’s stores had accumulated a maze of siloed systems. Their POS terminals, payment controllers, fuel pumps, and in-store devices were all running independently with little coordination. While these systems kept operations afloat, they created inefficiencies and made troubleshooting expensive and time-consuming. Without centralized monitoring, IT teams often had no choice but to dispatch technicians to stores, increasing both costs and downtime.
The decentralized environment also stifled agility. Rolling out patches, updates, or new applications across hundreds of locations often took weeks and was prone to inconsistencies. Hardware refresh cycles added further strain as each time a device failed or needed new functionality, stores had to purchase additional single-purpose hardware, driving up expenses and limiting flexibility.
It was clear to RaceTrac’s IT leadership that this reactive, hardware-heavy approach wasn’t sustainable. The company needed a modern, centrally managed edge platform capable of consolidating systems, improving visibility, and enabling innovation at scale.
The Reliant Platform: Consolidation and Control
To overcome these challenges, RaceTrac turned to Scale Computing’s Reliant Platform. Purpose-built for the demands of modern retail environments, the platform offered centralized control, real-time observability, and high availability across all store operations. With the Reliant Platform in place, RaceTrac’s IT team would be in a better position to deliver:
- Centralized management to roll out updates, patches, and applications chainwide in near real time.
- Virtualization at the edge, enabling new applications to be added via software rather than costly hardware purchases.
- Real-time observability into store systems, empowering IT teams to detect and resolve issues before they disrupted service.
- Cloud and hardware-agnostic flexibility, reducing vendor lock-in and extending the life of existing investments.
By consolidating disparate systems into a single edge platform, RaceTrac established a stable foundation to both modernize current operations and experiment with new customer-facing technologies. The shift to a unified edge platform delivered tangible operational benefits across the business, including:
- Reduced support incidents: Overall incidents fell by more than 40%, with issues resolved in minutes instead of hours or days.
- Fewer truck-rolls: On-site interventions dropped by 90%, lowering costs and allowing IT staff to focus on higher-value projects.
- Improved reliability: Fuel operations, POS, and foodservice systems now run on a highly available foundation designed to minimize downtime.
- Accelerated innovation: New applications can be deployed virtually in hours rather than weeks, empowering RaceTrac to experiment with loyalty programs, digital engagement, and more.
Since completing their deployment, the Reliant Platform has realized significant ROI by reducing downtime, lowering operational costs, and extending hardware life. Strategically, it has provided RaceTrac with the necessary agility to evolve alongside customer expectations without being tied to an inflexible infrastructure.
By transforming its IT operations from a fragmented, hardware-bound model into a unified, software-driven edge environment, RaceTrac has not only reduced costs and downtime but also empowered the company to scale innovation across its 775+ locations.
Read the full case study to learn how RaceTrac reinvented IT edge operations across 775+ stores.