By adopting Veeam Data Platform on cloud, Saudi Arabia’s Maestro Pizza by Daily Food Co has generated savings on IT OpEx and IT CapEx costs and has also disrupted market delivery times.
Established in 2013, Daily Food Co and its Maestro Pizza brand has scaled to become a fast-growing quick serve restaurant chain in Saudi Arabia. Inside Saudi Arabia it has a network of 180+ stores across all regions of the country. It has reached the coveted position as the most recognisable pizza brand in Saudi Arabia. It is now a national staple for its consumers in its mission to become Master Saudi Pizza.
Daily Food Co has been committed to pioneering the quick serve restaurant industry in Saudi Arabia through its focus on technology. The company was the first to introduce an e-commerce model that allowed customers to conveniently place orders on its online channels. Maestro Pizza furthered its position as an innovator and early adopter in 2016, becoming the first chain to introduce a mobile ordering and delivery apps to serve Saudi Arabia’s growing base of smartphone users.
Internally, each of Maestro Pizza’s 2,300 employees rely on technology to successfully carry out their day-to-day functions. With its dedicated development arm, the company has developed several proprietary applications that have streamlined operations. It has a fleet of 600+ delivery vehicles and its team of drivers utilises the custom developed application for order tracking and delivery.
“Every single order goes through our IT systems,” points out Omar Homsi, Head of ICT at Maestro Pizza by Daily Food Co.
IT is fundamental to every aspect of the company’s extensive operation across Saudi Arabia. The availability of applications and data is paramount. However, as Maestro Pizza continued its expansion across Saudi Arabia, the business developed pain points around its data management operations.
Pain points
When the performance limitations of its legacy data backup and restore solution resulted in the company’s POS application framework becoming unavailable for several hours, it was evident the IT team needed to find an alternative.
“We had an instance where our Point of Sales solution was unavailable for several hours. We could not take a single order for this extended period, which resulted in missed orders and lost revenue opportunities,” explains Homsi. The team was never sure if its data restore operation would work or not.
Another point of failure that was emerging as the business scaled its operations was the central database. This database aggregated all the incoming data from the stores across the country. A possible failure at this central point of IT operations would mean a complete halt in the country’s operations, since all the stores were pushing their data to this central database.
“If this goes down and cannot be rapidly restored, our operations will have no visibility into customer orders and consequently will not be able to support their tickets.”
Along with plans to replace its legacy data backup solution, Maestro Pizza was also planning to make significant changes to its IT architecture, platforms, and environment to help Maestro Pizza scale its operations seamlessly across the growing number of stores in Saudi Arabia.
Maestro Pizza’s IT team wanted to move from an IT platform that was heavily dependent on a datacentre with a disaster recovery site model towards a cloud-based architecture that was using the AWS public cloud hyperscaler platform.
Maestro Pizza’s IT team also decided to increase the number of VMs and the extent of virtualisation across its future IT platform. Any future data backup and restore solution would need to support a virtualisation and hyperscaler cloud architecture. These were amongst the important criteria for selection of the new data backup and restore solution.
Selection and implementation
Maestro Pizza selected the Veeam Data Platform to be deployed to support the growth of its operations.
Maestro Pizza used the Veeam Data Platform with its test cases for a week. Following the testing, Veeam Data Platform went live in under three days. The entire implementation was carried out by a single IT professional. Maestro Pizza selected the Veeam Data Platform with SureBackup and SureReplica.
“It worked like magic,” remarks Homsi. With Veeam hosted on AWS the migration of Maestro Pizza’s data to AWS was also seamless. “AWS helps to protect, manage and control our data effortlessly.”
Organisations are finding that as their data continues to grow with the business, existing backup and recovery solutions are also increasing from a time, administrative and cost resource standpoint. Recovery times become harder to meet due to the manual overhead associated with retrieving backup copies, impacting business performance, and leaving organisations at risk.
Backup and recovery solutions with AWS improves operational efficiency through seamless ease of use, fast backup times, simplifying data recovery, and reducing infrastructure and management costs.
API integration helps customers to leverage Veeam Software backup and recovery solutions, pointing to Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon S3 Standard, Amazon Glacier as endpoints. By leveraging Veeam Software and AWS storage services, customers gain an efficient and cloud-integrated backup and recovery solution that you know and trust. Pay-as-you-go pricing ensures that your organisation will only pay for what you use, providing significant cost savings compared to on-premises solutions.
The ease of use of the Veeam Data Platform has saved Maestro Pizza’s IT team many resource hours. The IT team found SureBackup and SureReplica from the Veeam Data Platform to be beneficial as they automate the backup process while ensuring the integrity of backups.
Maestro Pizza’s IT team also relies on Veeam to encapsulate all images into one. This feature helped the IT team to recover when the VM supporting the ERP system was not functional. The order processing had stopped because of this failure. Using Veeam the IT team was able to restore the required VM in 30 minutes.
“This simply would not have been possible with our old solution,” points out Homsi.
Maestro Pizza also found that its entire POS systems can be restored in less than an hour. The previous legacy system took several to hours to restore the POS system.
Benefits and gains
The high level of performance and automation by Veeam Data Platform on AWS has resulted in 60% reduction of the IT operating costs. This has created additional funds for the IT team to spend on as well as time for them to invest in innovation in other areas.
As an example, Maestro Pizza’s IT team has been able to implement an AI-based approach to manage large volumes of camera surveillance data generated across all its locations in Saudi Arabia.
By using Veeam Data Platform on AWS, Maestro Pizza has also gained the benefits of switching to a pay as you go, OpEx model of software licensing versus the capital cost expenditure model of its legacy data systems.
Homsi estimates that the OpEx model of Veeam Data Platform on AWS has helped to reduce its IT CapEx expenditure by 30%. “We have not had to buy any storage since the deployment,” he says.
Furthermore, Veeam Data Platform on AWS allows Maestro Pizza to choose which storage to use and buy, whether hardware storage on-premises or cloud-based storage.
“This also stands to save us tens of thousands of dollars as we continue to grow our operations,” says Homsi.
Veeam Data Platform on AWS has given the Maestro Pizza’s IT team confidence to competitively disrupt the Saudi market, “We disrupted the market with our commitment to fulfilling deliveries within 30 minutes, and ensuring orders are ready for pick just 10 minutes after a customer clicks the order button. Veeam gives us the confidence to make this commitment to customers,” says Homsi.
While the IT cost savings and IT efficiency gains from Veeam Data Platform on AWS are impressive, Maestro Pizza believes it is the ability to conduct business more efficiently and effectively that is the foremost benefit of utilising the Veeam Data Platform.
According to Homsi, other providers do not offer the innovation or customer experience that Veeam offers. “From both a customer support and technology perspective, they surpass expectations and are ahead of the market.”
And most importantly, “Veeam helps ensure that we serve pizzas to happy customers daily,” summarises Homsi.
Snapshot of benefits
- High levels of performance and automation
- Choice of traditional hardware or cloud storage
- Automates mission-critical backups
- IT team can focus on high-value initiatives
- Disrupted market with 30-minute delivery
- Disrupted market with 10-minute pickup
- Provides rapid data restore function
- 60% reduction in IT OpEx costs
- 30% reduction in IT CapEx costs
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