Landmark to delve deeper into the cloud to become digitally fit

• Oracle plays a key part in Landmark’s migration journey to the cloud.
• Group to migrate its e-commerce platform to data centres in Europe soon.
• Group exploring how technology can add value to its omnichannel ambitions and support future business growth.

Dubai: Landmark Group’s CIO’s strategy is to make the conglomerate a future-fit and digitally-focused by deploying all the emerging technologies.

The Dubai-headquartered group is the largest non-food retailer in the Middle East and India with more than 2,000 stores across 23 countries and with more than 40 brands.

Mohamed El Fanichi, Chief Information Officer at Landmark Group, was handed over the IT department, after taking charge in 2017, to explore how technology can add value to its omnichannel ambitions and support future business growth.

“Our focus has been to provide customers with the best service along with a truly integrated shopping experience. Convenience and customer experience are at the core of what we do,” he said.

For that, he said the best way to connect with its customers is through the cloud in a bid to offer an “integrated shopping experience”.

The group has around 70,000 customers globally.

 “For me, the best way to provide services, measure and deploy solutions to businesses is to move fast and manage challenges. When we decided to put the case to the group, I knew that it is going to give us a massive and competitive advantage,” he said.

Moreover, he said that the investments they made in the technologies to streamline its business processes, so far, have already bared fruit in the top and bottom lines of its businesses.

“In yesteryears, it used to take a minimum of three years to buy a server, commission the server, install the software and the OS. These days, it takes just 20 minutes. In the last more than one year, cloud allowed us to deploy new solutions and innovate in a much faster way,” he said.

Choose cloud partners wisely

Cloud was no longer a choice but a strategic imperative, he said and added that they need a technology that can understand the 360-degree view of its resources, take control and make changes.

Being an Oracle E-Business Suite customer, the group decided to roll out Oracle Retail solutions to accurately match supply and demand across its various operations.

“Oracle had a multi-cloud approach, the skills they have and the investment they made, we cannot match. We took 80 per cent of our business and core applications and migrated to the Oracle stack in two data centres in Europe,” he said.

The project took 12 months; he said but added that he has worked five months before the project by holding talks with the partners to understand the complexity of moving to the cloud.

In December 2018, the group went live with Oracle Retail suite of applications (pre-production) followed by a production go-live in April 2019.

 “The new Oracle-based systems enhanced visibility, agility, reduced costs and enabled smarter vendor negotiations. On-premises architecture is no different than in the public cloud but we had strong support from Oracle,” he said.

Choose your partner wisely, he said and added that Oracle and Microsoft Azure interconnect collaboration has facilitated so much for us and Oracle were there to support its migration journey to the cloud from the beginning.

“Our strategy is cloud-first by design but it takes a lot to be ready for the cloud. It takes a mindset to change, a thorough understanding of what you have, and a detailed discovery exercise to assess the readiness,” he said.

Factors to look for when choosing a partner

Regis Louis, Vice-President for Technology Strategy at Oracle EMEA, said that there is no one size fit all.

“There are various entry points to get started and people can start by taking their critical applications, the one that will maximise the move to the cloud.  In the last few years, it might not be possible to move the core applications to the cloud but now we have all the capabilities do so,” he said.

He said that Oracle’s cloud journey started 12 years ago with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and moved into the infrastructure and platform as services five years ago.

“Many customers haven’t taken their critical and core business apps and moved them to the public cloud. We tried to understand what were the challenges faced by the customers and by doing so, we found that they [challenges] were enterprise readiness, complexity/risk verses RoI, data sovereignty and lock-ins,” he said.

That is when, he said that Oracle decided to create a brand new infrastructure cloud from scratch with a key focus on engineering to address the challenges and that is Gen 2 Oracle cloud infrastructure.

Gartner in its “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services” report said that Oracle, a niche player, is now well-positioned to handle broad lift-and-shift use cases (not just those limited to Oracle applications) and hybrid workloads, and has a future focus on expanding the worldwide geographies it serves with competitive capabilities.

 “Oracle is distinguished among most companies of its lineage in that it has developed thoughtfully architected, hyperscale cloud architectures that are competitive with the more-established cloud providers,” it said.

Security is key

The research firm said that OCI has made substantial year-over-year gains related to required IaaS and PaaS capabilities, and delivers all capabilities simultaneously into all regions worldwide, unlike its competitors.

 “Compare and look at the capabilities of the cloud providers and performance and the hidden-cost factor,” Louis said.

To embrace the cloud, Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice-President and Regional Managing Director for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), said that the organisation needs to have “changed management”.

“You need to engage with the stakeholders early and often and choose your cloud partner wisely. Look at the investment the cloud partner has made in the country, support structure, services and security standards. Security is going to be critical as you move a lot of mission-critical applications on to the cloud,” he said.

“Don’t just think about cost savings by moving to the cloud, think about delivering capability, helping transform your business,” he said.

Fanichi said that their next journey is to migrate its e-commerce platform to the cloud in the data centres in Germany and the UK.

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