About Retail Assist
Retail Assist provides award-winning IT services and solutions to leading brands in retail and hospitality worldwide. They provide international brands with Merret Pro, their integrated omnichannel supply chain solution, as well as a variety of managed IT services and other retail-specific solutions that reduce costs, optimise retail operations and support higher revenues.
Business Needs
Retail Assist were in the process of developing a complementary, new product, OMIO PIM (Product Information Management), which needed to run as future-proof platform. As part of the scoping, they decided to embrace cloud technology for new feature development and modernisation of their existing application, and as such they investigated the product offerings available and whether the Azure cloud platform would be suitable for them.
Why Black Marble
Retail Assist wanted to engage with an Azure and DevOps specialist to support the implementation and adoption of Azure, and to gain some external validation of the planned architecture for the new cloud-based solution.
Black Marble has an internationally recognised team of Azure DevOps and integration experts, and a proven track record of delivering and supporting our solutions. Add to this our status as a Microsoft Gold partner of more than 15 years, Black Marble stood out amongst the competition and was an obvious choice for Retail Assist.
Solution
Many organisations move services to the cloud organically and without first exploring the areas of governance and policy that are essential for effective use. Many processes need to change to make use of public cloud services like Microsoft Azure, including development, testing, deployment and management. Black Marble’s recommended approach for any organisation seriously considering a move to the cloud is to first participate in a cloud adoption workshop.
The format tends to be a wide ranging, free-form investigatory and explorative workshop which allows Black Marble to gain an understanding of current cloud maturity in the organisation, as well as gathering an insight into future use of the Azure Platform. Based on the workshop’s findings, Black Marble produced a report detailing recommendations as to how to proceed.
Recommendations from this workshop included a set of architectures for Retail Assist’s OMIO PIM software, suggestions on how to upskill internal staff, as well as several other recommendations around governance, security, cost management and monitoring within the Azure platform.
Following on from the report, Retail Assist approached Black Marble to help them with implementing some of the recommendations provided. This included running a tailored upskilling hackathon to help the Retail Assist team be able to successfully and efficiently manage the new Azure hosted environment, as well as helping them set up additional monitoring with custom alerting to meet their needs.
Get in touch with our Business Development team to find out how Black Marble can aid your organisation on its Azure DevOps journey.
