To help drive growth and enhance customer engagement, leading pan-Asian retailer Dairy Farm Group has selected a multi-million dollar managed private cloud solution from Telstra.

With more than 100,000 employees and 5,800 stores and franchises across Asia – including IKEA, Mannings and 7-ELEVEN – the Dairy Farm Group serves more than one billion consumers annually across its highly diversified businesses. Under the agreement, Telstra will oversee the storage, physical security, maintenance and connectivity of the company’s SAP suite, enabling the organisation to stay focused on its core business.

“We undertook a very detailed selection process and chose Telstra as our successful cloud infrastructure partner due to their flexibility, ability to scale and willingness to adjust and refine the proposal in line with our needs. The total cost of ownership and immediate partnership that developed during the negotiation phase, also influenced our final decision,” said Gerhard Roux, CIO, the Dairy Farm Group.

The Dairy Farm Group’s SAP migration to Telstra’s private cloud offering commenced in November 2014, with health and beauty stores being the first to move, and is due for completion in April 2015. The firm is continuing to explore further expansion of the platform, including unified communications as a service, network and retail media solutions within the next two years.

“Opting for Telstra’s managed private cloud solution should also help lower the total cost of ownership for the Dairy Farm Group’s SAP suite, with less resources required to manage the environment,” said Andrew Wildblood, Head of Asia Pacific Enterprise, Global Enterprise & Services, Telstra.

“Hosting business applications in the cloud, helps empower the Dairy Farm Group’s employees to work on the move, delivering a consistent level of productivity while addressing increasing demand for mobile workspaces. Furthermore, the Dairy Farm Group will benefit from improved business continuity with the managed solution’s disaster recovery offerings.

“Growing numbers of companies are looking to outsource the management of their infrastructure to providers such as Telstra. By leveraging the benefits of private cloud today, we believe the Dairy Farm Group is well placed to steal a march on its competitors and deliver even more innovative modern retail solutions to its customers across Asia,” Mr Wildblood concluded.

About the Dairy Farm Group

Dairy Farm is a leading pan-Asian retailer. At 30th June 2014, the Group and its associates and joint ventures operated over 5,800 outlets and employed over 100,000 people. It had total annual sales in 2013 exceeding US$12 billion. The Group operates supermarkets, hypermarkets, convenience stores, health and beauty stores and home furnishings stores under well-known brands.