Northgate Market Selects Pimcore to Lead Migration onto Google Cloud Platform

HOUSTON - June 26, 2019 - PRLog -- Northgate Market has partnered with Pimcore and SADA Systems to continue innovating how retail and supermarkets operate. Northgate has launched the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) initiative to migrate all their servers from on-premise and AWS to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Northgate and Pimcore identified GCP as the next generation infrastructure solution to host all of Northgate Market's applications because of their flexibility, analytics and Big Data capabilities. Northgate has also leveraged SADA Systems to assist in the company's migration to GCP. The initiative is geared to help Northgate Market add value to their infrastructure landscape by eliminating multiple on-premise data centers and provision a standardized and scalable environment. This has helped improve the robustness of the IT services by enhancing control on utilization, security, and monitoring.

Over the past few years, Northgate had increased investments in their infrastructure hardware systems in their on-premise and colocation data centers. They also leveraged AWS for many applications. As the older, on-premise infrastructure had run its course and was no longer able to support the company's ever-maturing digital needs, Northgate decided to move ahead with an IaaS model on GCP. The command that GCP provides over the control of VMs, along with the ability for live migrations, helped put to rest concerns of moving enterprise solutions to the cloud with minimal downtime.

"It is clear that the future is in leveraging cloud services, not hardware. We recognized we needed to reinvent our strategy and really future proof our infrastructure, and Google Cloud Platform was exactly what we were looking for," said Harrison Lewis, CIO, Northgate. "We've worked with Pimcore for quite some time and they really understand our organization's culture and the talent in the Northgate IT associates, as well as the priority and urgency of this project. Pimcore was instrumental assisting us in rationalizing our server environment resulting in a 60 percent reduction in server count. And, they assisted in preparing our data, network, application, and security architectures along with our talented IT associates for the cloud."

Pimcore has led numerous initiatives for deploying enterprise solutions on the cloud and brought with it technical and managerial expertise to the partnership. "This is truly a strategic move for both Northgate and Google Cloud, as Northgate is building a more mature digital environment, and Google Cloud is increasing its market share in the cloud provider space," said Shashin Shah, CEO, Pimcore. "Pimcore brought to the project its expertise in cloud deployments and the customer service values it shares with Northgate. In the retail space, everyone is looking to sustain innovation by moving to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service model, but the complexity of IT landscapes and the requirement for up-time presents the greatest challenge. Pimcore partnered with Northgate to go beyond the technical aspect and utilize project management best practices, business agility and ingrained business processes. We put in place all the processes such as change management, security, data governance and 24x7 monitoring, as well as escalations. We adopted a comprehensive migration strategy in conjunction with the standard lift and shift process. Overall, Pimcore works very closely with Northgate to realize the core business objective of its migration project."

Northgate future-proofs itself not only by leveraging GCP's App Engine and Compute Engine options, but also the ability to crunch large amounts of data to aid in optimizing their operations and offer the best possible customer experience in-store and online. Northgate is utilizing GCP's Big Query capabilities and building a Data Lake. TensorFlow will be employed for machine learning and truly help innovate how the business operates. By using a single cloud platform, Northgate is reducing rogue environments and ensuring increased data integrity and security. Moving away from an on-premise architecture has reduced geographical restrictions for their data-focused tasks, and improved performance by reducing latency. Ultimately, migrating to GCP reinforces discipline in Northgate's infrastructure and enforces a consistent environment for management.

A hallmark project for Northgate, Pimcore, SADA Systems and Google Cloud Platform, all partners look forward to the win-win position this initiative presents through increased and sustained quality of service to internal as well as external customers.

About Pimcore:
Pimcore is a software vendor for free and open-source customer experience management, digital asset management, product information management, multi-channel publishing and e-commerce software. The company is based in Salzburg, Austria, with offices in Houston, TX, USA and New Delhi, India. Pimcore has over 110 system integrators and digital agencies as partners with over 105,000 successful installations in 56 countries in 22 languages. For more information, visit http://www.pimcore.com.