Cloud Spotlight
Primark Fashions Cloud Future with Broadcom
For mass-market fashion retailers, success requires interpreting global Primark, one of the best in the business, embraces a cloud future with VMware Cloud Foundation and Azure VMware Solution to ensure its continued agility.
A
s fashion retailers compete across their bricks-and-mortar and online stores, it has become critical to establish an adaptive IT infrastructure. Point of Sale (POS) terminals
must operate without fail, and real-time stock updates are critical to optimise inventory management. With 430 stores in 18 countries, 75,000 employees, and a turnover of EUR €10 billion, Primark understands the value that speed, agility and scalability bring. Te company relies on and takes action based on daily business reports. “Innovation is in how we manage our business,” says Stephen
Byrne, head of global infrastructure at Primark. “And, as a business that innovates, we look for opportunities regarding automation, value, and speed. None of that can happen without the underlying IT services being in place to support it.” Primark is growing and anticipates having 530 stores by 2026.
Despite this growth, the company is on track to reduce its physical data centre footprint. Tus, Primark required a new, highly agile infrastructure and a cloud-first approach, or precisely, a cloud strategy that allows critical applications to be kept on a private cloud, all while allowing the option to seamlessly move those applications to, or back from, the public cloud when appropriate. Te new infrastructure is built on VMware Cloud Foundation
(VCF) technology and was designed and implemented by partner Triangle Technology Services, the 2023 VMware EMEA Customer Lifecycle Award Winner. “Initially, we partnered with Primark on a large Oracle project,
and over the subsequent years, we have transformed its VMware footprint and SaaS estate from legacy environments to a fully-fledged VMware soſtware-defined stack,” says Donal Byrne, CTO of Triangle Technology Services. “Primark now has an IT infrastructure that matches the speed of the business.” Triangle leveraged VCF (and Advanced Services for VCF) to design and implement the migration of four data centres into two and create a third one on Azure VMware Solution, which provides a VCF environment in the Azure cloud. Mission-critical applications can, therefore, be moved back and forth seamlessly between the two new private cloud data centres
44 | March/April 2025
and the Azure VMware Solution public cloud environment. In fact, Primark has already moved certain applications to the Azure VMware Solution environment, and VMs can be rapidly added as usage scales up. Over 50 virtual machines are in the public cloud, and the number is growing. Primark enjoys automated capacity reporting and has experienced zero outages in the last six months. In addition, Triangle has successfully migrated workloads to Azure
VMware Solution. Te migration maintains the standard security profile for all workloads, addressing one of the retailer’s essential risk requirements and audit points. “A secure environment that’s also cost-effective meets our needs in
terms of how we manage it and the value it provides,” says Byrne. Triangle has transformed the entirety of Primark’s operations,
including changing the license type from perpetual to subscription. Te portability of VCF subscriptions to and from Azure VMware Solution is now offered by Broadcom and Microsoſt, providing Primark with the agility to deploy on-premises or in the cloud as preferred. “Our reliability has improved drastically since we modernised
our data centres,” says Cian O’Leary, data centre operations lead at Primark. “With Primark’s aggressive opening of new stores, we’ve needed to leverage our soſtware-defined data centre (SDDC) platform to scale quickly when needed. Although store planning can take up to three years, from an infrastructure point of view, we’re ready to go at a flick of a switch.” Te company increased its retail store footprint by 5 per cent, 22
stores, in 2024. Tere was a 100 per cent improvement in stability and performance tickets during peak trading periods and zero store outages and incidents compared to weekly critical incidents seen previously. Te platform’s success built on VCF is evident in the evolving
architecture supporting the company’s growth without significant operational overhaul. “Te impact we’ve seen is incredibly positive,” says Byrne. “Te
business can’t grow without us being able to provide these services, and we’re doing this seamlessly.”
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