Maestro Pizza saves 60% on IT costs using Veeam Data Platform

Since its inception, Maestro Pizza has been committed to pioneering the quick serve restaurant industry in Saudi Arabia through its unparalleled focus on technology. The company, which owns Maestro Pizza, the Kingdom’s most recognizable pizza brand, was the first to introduce an e-commerce model that allowed its customers to conveniently place orders on its online channels. Maestro Pizza furthered its position as an innovator and early adopter in 2016, becoming the first chain to introduce a mobile ordering and delivery apps to serve the Saudi Arabia’s rapidly growing base of smartphone users.

Internally, each of Maestro Pizza’s 2,300 employees rely on technology to successfully carry out their day-to-day functions.

“Ultimately every single order goes through our IT systems,” Omar Homsi, Head of ICT at Maestro Pizza by Daily Food Co. With its dedicated development arm, the company develops several proprietary applications that have streamlined operations.

“We have a fleet of over 600 delivery vehicles and our skilled team of drivers utilize our custom developed app for order tracking and delivery,” he said.

IT is fundamental to every aspect of the company’s extensive operation across the entire Kingdom. The availability of applications and data is paramount. However, as Maestro Pizza continued its expansion, its IT team recognized the shortcomings of their existing backup solution.

“We never knew if our restores would work or not, we had an instance where our Point of Sales (POS) solution went down for several hours. Consequently, we could not take a single order for this extended period, which resulted in losses of missed orders and revenue opportunities,” states Homsi.

“Another concern was our central database to which all stores push data. If this goes down and cannot be rapidly restored, our operations will have no visibility into customer orders and consequently won’t be able to support their tickets.”

When it was looking to replace its legacy backup solution, Maestro Pizza was also formulating plans to significantly transform its IT environment. It wanted to move from a data center and disaster recovery site model to one that heavily incorporated the use of the AWS public cloud. Simultaneously, the company was increasing the extent of virtualization in its environment. Against this backdrop, innovation, and virtualization and cloud support became key selection criteria for the company’s new backup solution.

For these reasons, Maestro Pizza selected the Veeam Data Platform for a deployment that Homsi remembers as having “worked like magic.”

“We ran our test cases for a week and following that, went live in under three days. Best of all, the entire implementation was carried out by a single IT professional,” said Homsi. “We also had comfort that Veeam delivers a seamless, comprehensive backup solution to move our data to Amazon Web Services (AWS) thus help us protect, manage and control our data effortlessly”.

This ease of use of the Veeam solution has subsequently saved the company’s IT team countless resource hours. The IT team has found the SureBackup and SureReplica features of the Veeam Data Platform to be especially beneficial as they effectively automate the backup process while ensuring the integrity of backups.

“We also rely on Veeam to encapsulate all images into one, citing an example of how this “saved the day” for the organization. “Our ERP system once went down on account of its VM being damaged. Without this, it was not possible for us to process any orders. However, Veeam empowered us to restore the VM in just 30 minutes. This simply would not have been possible with our old solution.” said Homsi.

Similarly, restoring its POS systems — an operation which previously took over several hours — is now possible in less than an hour.

This high level of performance and automation has resulted in a 60% reduction in Maestro Pizza’s IT operating costs. “This has meant our IT team has far more budget and time to dedicate to innovation projects. As an example, we were able to implement and AI-based approach to manage the large volumes of camera surveillance data that is generated across all our locations,” said Homsi.

The OpEx savings that have been made possible by Veeam, have been complemented by ongoing capital cost savings too. “I estimate that Veeam has delivered a 30% reduction in our IT CapEx as we have not had to buy any storage since the deployment. Furthermore, their solution enables us to use any storage we choose — whether traditional hardware or cloud based. This stands to save us tens of thousands of dollars as we continue to grow our operations,” said Homsi.

While these results are impressive, Maestro IT Team believes it is the ability to conduct business more efficiently and effectively that is the foremost benefit of utilizing the Veeam Data Platform.

“We disrupted the market with our commitment to fulfilling deliveries within 30 minutes, and ensuring orders are ready for pick just 10 minutes after a customer clicks the order button. Veeam gives us the confidence to make this incredible commitment to our customers,” says Homsi. “Other providers simply don’t offer the innovation or customer experience that Veeam delivers. From both a customer support and technology perspective, they surpass expectations and are years ahead of the market”.

Homsi concludes “The value of our relationship is perhaps best encapsulated in this single fact — Veeam helps ensure that we serve pizzas to happy customers daily.”

• Enables 60% reduction in OpEx costs and 30% reduction in CapEx costs 
  High levels of performance and automation has resulted in a 60% reduction in Maestro Pizza’s IT operating costs. Furthermore, as Veeam enables the company to utilize any storage solution — whether traditional hardware or cloud based — it has realized a 30% reduction in capital costs.
• Automates mission-critical backups, enabling the IT team to focus on high-value initiatives 
  Maestro IT team stated that because Veeam “works like magic,” the solution needs little to no oversight. Consequently, Maestro IT team has been able to focus their efforts on driving innovation to maintain the company’s position as an industry pioneer. “Most recently, we were able to implement an AI-based approach to managing the large volumes of camera surveillance data that is generated across all our locations,” said Homsi.
• Provides rapid restoration, ensuring ability to fulfill immense volume of pizza orders daily
  When mission-critical systems, which previously took several hours to restore, go down, Maestro IT team have the confidence that Veeam will enable them to get things back up and running in under an hour. “We disrupted the market with our commitment to fulfilling deliveries within 30 minutes, and ensuring orders are ready for pick up just 10 minutes after a customer clicks the order button. Veeam gives us the confidence to make this incredible commitment to our customers,” said Homsi.