The Middle East’s major entertainment retailer Virgin Megastore plans to migrate SAP ERP application workloads to IBM Cloud to gain flexibility, scale to help meet increasing consumer needs and bring increased levels of security to protect critical data.
IBM in collaboration with its business partner in Saudi Arabia Brmaja Commercial Company (Brmaja), has announced that Virgin Megastore KSA, a major entertainment retailer in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is migrating its SAP ERP application workloads to IBM Cloud as part of its hybrid cloud strategy. The migration from on-premises to a cloud environment is designed to help the retailer create operational efficiencies and provide a platform for new digital services to its clients.
Habits formed during the COVID-19 pandemic have raised consumers’ expectations for digital engagement, especially in service industries like retail. This is encouraging retailers to transform their operations to deliver an efficient, secured and seamless experience across front and back-end business processes. Now retailers are modernising operations, including mission-critical workloads such as finance and inventory reporting, as well as customer-facing processes to enhance experiences while protecting their data.
By migrating its ERP workloads to IBM Cloud, Virgin Megastore KSA will aim to boost productivity across business functions to help meet the evolving needs of its growing network of shoppers. With a secured and open hybrid cloud approach from IBM, the retailer aims to significantly reduce administration and reporting time, allowing their sales teams to stay focused on driving client experiences.
“Modernising our infrastructure will allow us to enhance our customer-facing and back-end performance, allowing our employees to focus on delivering world-class experiences for shoppers,” said Russel Bacha, Head, Technology and Loyalty, Virgin Megastore KSA. “Through working with IBM to accelerate our journey to the cloud in a way that helps ensure we’re able to protect client data, we can uncover new ways to reduce time-to-market and streamline operations – that will enhance the digital and real-life experiences of our customers.”
By embracing a secured and open hybrid cloud approach, Virgin Megastore KSA expects to innovate and adapt quickly to the digital era – finding new ways to reach shoppers, amid the existing challenges that mandate some of its employees who are still working remotely.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the challenges facing many retailers in the region are extensive. By adopting a secured and open hybrid cloud strategy with IBM, Virgin Megastore KSA can modernise applications and access an innovative infrastructure, designed to be agile and easily adaptable to the expanding needs of the company, while offering a more personalised and secured experience for shoppers,” said Fahad Alanazi, General Manager, IBM Saudi Arabia. “By working with Virgin Megastore KSA to accelerate its Digital Transformation, we are able to support the company’s business vision and fuel its growth.”
Virgin Megastore is a global entertainment retailer with over 40 stores in nine markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Virgin Megastore has set an unbounded target of expanding its regional presence. Since it opened its first store in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2008, Virgin Megastore continued to expand domestically presenting a one-stop shop for all entertainment needs, offering a wide range of lifestyle products across music, fashion, culture, technology, entertainment, beauty and other related services.
As an international entertainment retailing chain founded in early 1976 by Sir Richard Branson as a record shop on London’s Oxford Street, Virgin Megastore
opened its first megastore at the end of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road in 1979. The company expanded to hundreds of stores worldwide in the 1990s, but has lost a large number of stores in recent years, largely with the sale and eventual closing of the UK, US, Irish, Canadian, Australian, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek and Japanese stores. By 2015, current operations are exclusively in the Middle East and in North Africa, consisting of approximately 40 stores.
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