How Stefanini and Extenda Retail are Transforming Retail with Cloud-Native Technology Solutions for Seamless Innovation and Growth
Strong businesses rely on their technology and systems to underpin their innovation and growth. But unless your business-critical systems can evolve and modernize, they will prevent you from staying ahead of the competition. This is especially true in retail, where trends can change overnight, and customer expectations shift just as quickly. In the retail industry, adaption and innovation are vital for success.
To help our clients operating in the retail space, Stefanini has cultivated a long-standing collaborative partnership with Extenda Retail. Together, we have embarked on a journey to revolutionise the retail industry through innovative solutions and forward-thinking strategies.
Harnessing the Power of SaaS for Retail
For retailers aiming to modernize their application ecosystems, adopting a Software as a Service (SaaS) model offers a flexible, scalable solution that eliminates the complexities of traditional IT infrastructure.
Our solution, Hii Retail operates on a SaaS delivery model that enables users to access the application through a web browser or app on their computer, tablet or mobile device, providing convenience and flexibility. This eliminates the need for local server hardware, operating system installations, and database management helping to:
- Streamline operations
- Reduce overhead costs
- Deliver seamless, innovative customer experiences
Using SaaS means that we can maintain complete control over your application instances, overseeing the underlying infrastructure, including servers, databases, and message queues. This level of control allows us to deploy applications that follow the best practices of continuous software delivery. And because we can observe every aspect of application and performance logs, we can proactively prevent, detect and recover from application faults more efficiently.
Simplifying IT Management for Retailers
From your perspective, Stefanini’s partnership with Extenda Retail as a SaaS provider alleviates the burden of IT management. Together we take full responsibility for:
- Infrastructure provisioning and maintenance
- Software deployment and upgrades
- Operational uptime and performance
- Disaster recovery
- Business continuity
- Information security controls.
Building a Future-Ready Retail Ecosystem
The whole ecosystem operates on a cloud-native architecture, specifically the Google Cloud Platform. Using cloud-native technologies and following microservices patterns we embrace a headless, API-first strategy. Some of the key technical components and tools we use include:
Google Cloud Platform: including various services such as CloudRun, CloudSQL, SecretManager, Key Management Service, Logs Explorer, and Cloud Monitoring for a robust and scalable infrastructure.
CI/CD: our team adopts GitHub Actions and follows a trunk-based delivery approach, where each commit goes directly into production. Canary deployments ensure controlled and gradual rollouts.
Protocols: REST, gRPC, WebSocket, and MQTT protocols are used for seamless communication between components and systems.
Another standout feature of our cloud-based solution is Hii Checkout, a platform that enables a unified commerce experience. Through a single engine and modern APIs, Hii Checkout ensures consistent personalization, pricing, promotions and brand experience across all types of checkouts – those used by shoppers and those used by in-store staff – for a seamless checkout process.
Data-Driven Retail: Meeting Customer Expectations
Data is the crucial driver of today’s supply chain management in retail. Without it, business cannot ensure ensures product availability, quality and safety, as well as flexibility. And while it is challenging for retailers to keep up with changing customer expectations that are influenced by technology, convenience, personalisation and social values, Stefanini and Extenda Retail’s omnichannel ecosystem makes it easy to integrate data collection and analysis into your processes. Enabling you to better understand customer behaviour, preferences, and feedback, and optimize your operations and marketing, and customer service accordingly.
We help you harness the power of cloud-native technologies while adhering to industry best practices, setting a new standard in retail innovation. With Stefanini and Extenda Retail you can embrace seamless transformation, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and stay ahead in a challenging retail landscape.
Take the First Step to Modernization
At Stefanini, our Application Modernization Service takes the systems and platforms you already rely on a day-to-day basis and optimizes them to improve your productivity and increase ROI. So, you are prepared for anything the future can throw at you. Our clients have already experienced the transformational effects of a partnership with Stefanini.
