Avolta Chooses Scale Computing™ to Future-Proof IT for 1M+ Daily Transactions
Avolta North America, operator of Hudson and other global retail brands, needed a scalable, resilient IT foundation to support 2,000+ high-traffic locations across North America. By deploying the Scale Computing Reliant Platform™ Edge Computing as a Service, Avolta modernized its IT operations with high availability, virtualization, and flexible application delivery across retail and hospitality environments.
Challenge: Ensure Reliability at Scale in High-Traffic Environments
Avolta North America, operating under Hudson, HMS Host, and Dufry brands, manages more than 2,000 locations across the U.S. and Canada, processing over a million customer transactions daily. With such high volumes, downtime or failures in guest-facing systems can cause both revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction.
Supporting this environment meant balancing multiple technologies, from POS and payment systems to pay-at-table and digital services, each with their own unique infrastructure needs. Legacy and fragmented IT systems increased costs and complexity, creating challenges in maintaining reliability and compliance.
Operating within airports and other secured environments added another layer of complexity. Technical support was often physically constrained by TSA security, meaning Avolta needed in-store systems that could sustain uninterrupted operation with high availability and automated failover.
Additionally, Avolta’s leadership wanted a platform that would not just solve today’s reliability challenges but also scale to support future applications and hospitality innovations. CTO Dave Stubbs stressed the need for an extensible, retail-hardened solution that aligned with long-term business goals.
The growing demands of both retail and hospitality segments made clear that traditional infrastructure was insufficient. A new IT foundation was required, one that combined resilience, flexibility, and centralized control.
The Solution: A Unified Platform, Purpose-Built for Resilience
Avolta selected Scale Computing Reliant Platform as the foundation for its modernization strategy. Built on Intel® architecture, the Reliant Platform provides a unified approach to application delivery, networking, and in-store compute.
The solution supported both virtualization and containerization, enabling Avolta to run Windows VMs and Linux-based containers side by side, deployed seamlessly through UI or API integrations. This eliminated the need for fragmented appliances while improving deployment speed.
High availability was also a critical requirement: the Reliant Platform’s built-in redundancy and real-time failover ensured that POS, payment, and hospitality systems remained operational, even in environments where on-site troubleshooting wasn’t always available.
The platform’s cloud-agnostic architecture gave Avolta the flexibility to choose hardware, cloud hosting, and application vendors. This reduced vendor lock-in and optimized IT costs while supporting consistent deployment across a diverse footprint.
Scale Computing’s holistic approach also delivered observability and monitoring, reducing the risks associated with deploying customer-facing applications in mission-critical, high-traffic environments.
Results: Reduced Costs, Greater Agility, Improved Reliability
With the Reliant Platform Edge Computing as a Service, Avolta was able to consolidate disparate systems into a single, retail-hardened platform, significantly reducing its total cost of ownership.
The flexibility to virtualize and containerize workloads allowed faster adoption of new applications while extending the life of existing systems. This increased business agility and supported rapid response to changing customer expectations.
Reliability also improved dramatically, with automated failover ensuring uptime for critical guest-facing systems in high-traffic locations. This was particularly important in restricted-access environments where downtime could not be easily addressed.
The platform has helped position Avolta for future growth. Its extensible architecture ensures that as new technologies are introduced, from digital ordering and expanded hospitality services to emerging payment methods, the company can now support them seamlessly.
As CTO Dave Stubbs put it, “Scale Computing has been a true partner throughout this innovation journey, delivering what we need quickly and reliably. But more than that, Scale Computing has actively participated in the process to ensure we build our solutions in a way that best enables them for success.”