Malaysian retail and wholesale giant, Mydin Mohamed Holdings Berhad, has found the agility and speed it needs in cloud computing to propel its rapidly growing business.
The company operates 100 stores nationwide -- including 10 hypermarkets, 18 emporiums, three bazaars, 54 mini markets, nine convenient stores and six franchise outlets -- and it is eyeing US$840 million (RM2.6 billion) in sales for its current financial year ending March 31 next year. By end of 2013, it will have opened 8 more hypermarkets with investments totaling some RM850 million.
Last August, the company took just two and a half weeks to deploy a cloud-based point of sale (POS) solution across 25 stores, and that included time spent waiting for stores to open. Similar projects would have taken between 3 and 6 months in the past.
Direct impact
"Our mini market model is entirely based on cloud-based point of sale," said Malik Murad Ali, IT director of Mydin Mohamed Holdings Berhad, in a GoToMeeting web conference. "The POS is mission critical for us because if the system goes down, it will affect our business and customers directly."
The POS feature is part of a retail solution from home-grown company Xilnex that offers customer and service management, inventory control, services tracking and integrated marketing tools. These are streamed over to clients and function as locally installed applications so they continue to work if the Internet or network is disconnected. Application data is synchronized automatically once the system reconnects to the network.
"The most important factor is that it is affordable and easy to deploy and use," said Malik. "As long as you are connected to the Internet, we can complete the set-up within an hour. We then spend the next 2 hours training the staff on the solution."
Behind every solution
Such successes have persuaded Malik that "cloud technology is the way forward for our company. Today, whenever we look at any solution, application or product, the first question asked is whether it has a cloud strategy or platform."