Distributor of Calvin Klein Jeans and Calvin Klein Underwear Warnaco Asia has recently tabbed on virtualization technology to upgrade its POS system that supports 650 retail outlets across the Asia Pacific.
With retail outlets located across Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and China, Warnaco’s IT team used to upgrade all the PC-based POS terminals across these locations within a window of less than eight hours. The process was very time-consuming, labour-intensive and costly as the company is continuously expanding the number of outlets and locations.
"By virtualizing our applications and servers, we’re able to update the POS terminal network and add new applications whenever we need to," said Patrick Lamp, IT director, Asia-Pacific, Warnaco Asia.
Through adopting Citrix’s virtualization and networking technologies, Warnaco centralizes its POS system in Hong Kong, the regional headquarter. Each outlet can access the system via a broadband network, instead of hosting the system at individual POS terminal, previously. Upgrade can be implemented remotely to all the POS nodes from Hong Kong, thus reducing time-spent and realizing cost saving.
"Our store in Beijing is a perfect example. Although it is one of our larger stores, the only mission-critical IT component we have on-site is a regular business broadband link to our Asia Pacific headquarters and data centre in Hong Kong via the Citrix web interface– a cost of around US$35 per month,” he said. “Not only is this far more cost-effective than before, but it also gives us total control of the upgrade process – in other words, we’re spending less in order to achieve more."
He added the technology also allows Warnaco to reduce the number of IT staff to only one person in each remote location. This is particularly important for Warnaco as it plans to increase the outlets to 1,000 by 2013. Other brands Warnaco carry include Chaps, Olga, Speedo and Warner’s.
Apart from the POS system, Warnaco also runs its Microsoft Office Suite and Microsoft Exchange over the virtualized architecture. This allows travelling executives to securely access the corporate network for daily sales and inventory data, in order to roll out any ad-hoc store-specific promotion activities.
"The concept of virtualizing back office applications is obviously not new, but we are not aware of many retail companies that have taken the bold step of virtualizing their POS terminals," said Victor Wong, regional director, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Citrix. "This marks a real innovation, and underlines the many ways that virtualized solutions can help companies, regardless of size, industrial sector, or the geographies in which they operate."