OREANDA-NEWS. IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Giant Eagle, Inc., one of the US’s largest privately held multi-format food, fuel and pharmacy retailers with locations across Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland and Indiana, is in the initial stages of overhauling its IT infrastructure with a hybrid cloud solution from IBM Cloud.
The new solution, based on IBM Cloud’s Infrastructure as a Service, SoftLayer, is designed to provide Giant Eagle flexible, consumption-based pricing, as well as faster procurement and provisioning of applications, and integrated system management for greater visibility into data from everything from the supply chain to the check-out line.

Founded in 1931, Giant Eagle serves more than five million customers annually in more than 420 locations. To succeed through the years, Giant Eagle has been a leader in innovation, adopting such industry-changing practices as glass freezer-cases in the 1950’s, a digitized supply chain in the 1960’s, and fuelperks!, an industry-leading loyalty program started in 2004. All of its moves through the years have been designed to ultimately improve the shopping experience and overall value to customers.

“Our goals to reposition our technology infrastructure were to achieve the scalability, security, reliability, resiliency and efficiency that the advancements in the technology are making possible without making significant capital investments,” said Jeremy Gill, Senior Director of Technology Infrastructure at Giant Eagle. “IBM’s full range of offerings from public cloud, private cloud and bare metal and robust security capabilities were their competitive differentiators.”

Giant Eagle is currently in phase one of its rollout, which includes the deployment of the development/test and disaster recovery environments. Phase two will include migrating its production IT operations to IBM.

“Companies that succeed for as long as Giant Eagle have done so because they understand the value of adopting innovation,” said Jim Comfort, General Manager, IBM Cloud. “For Giant Eagle, the move to an IBM hybrid cloud is just the latest example of its foresight and it will serve as the next strategic move in the company’s digital transformation.”