Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 09 | Page 13

MASH continues European expansion with Oracle food and beverage cloud CSC selects Opengear Smart Out-of-band to streamline remote management M odern American Steak House (MASH), a high-end Danish restaurant chain, has chosen Oracle Simphony Cloud to power its steak house restaurants across Europe. With 13 restaurant locations across Denmark, Germany and the UK, and plans for additional international growth, MASH needed a technology platform that could support the strategic expansion of its business at scale. In addition, the restaurant needed a solution that would help reduce the complexity of its IT infrastructure and streamline both front and back-office operations across all of its restaurant locations. “Our biggest challenge was scalability – since opening MASH in 2009, our expansion into other countries proved to be a very difficult and complex undertaking due to obstacles around IT infrastructure, regulations, taxes, language and currency, so finding a technology solution that would help us manoeuvre around these obstacles and enable us to grow at scale was a top priority,” said Mirek Nørkjær, Assistant COO, Copenhagen Concepts, the parent company of MASH restaurants. “Implementing Oracle Simphony Cloud has enabled us to minimise IT complexity through one centralised system, streamline front and back-office operations with real-time data and localisation capabilities, and support our vision for expansion, all at scale.” Oracle Simphony Cloud provides MASH with one centralised system to manage operations across all 13 of its restaurants, reducing the cost and complexity of IT, ensuring high-performance scalability and allowing for more business efficiency and agility. In addition, Oracle Simphony Cloud enables MASH to maintain brand standards across its restaurants globally by enforcing brand, menu and employee management standards and allowing for localisation. It also ensures menu and pricing consistency, within a country, a region, or a single location and offers multilanguage and currency support. www.intelligentcio.com O pengear, a leading provider of solutions that deliver secure, resilient network access and automation to critical IT infrastructure, has announced CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd, a Finnish centre of expertise in Information and Communications Technology, has deployed Opengear Smart Out-Of-Band appliances to streamline a major upgrade project and improve day-to-day remote management. CSC, a non-profit organisation with 70% ownership by the state of Finland and 30% controlled by Finnish higher education institutions, provides services for research, education, culture, public administration and enterprises to help them thrive and benefit society at large. Antti Ristimäki, Senior Network Specialist for CSC, explained: “Getting from our data centres to some of the sites we look after might take many hours and so having remote out-of-band access is vital for us.” CSC has used a legacy out-of- band (OOB) console server solution for several years, but with a major network upgrade planned for 2018–2020, it was decided that more flexibility was needed to help the small networking team support clients at around 40 sites spread across the country. “What we liked most about Opengear was its small footprint and high-quality software, along with the 4G mobile connectivity option which provides us with the opportunity to deploy the OOB console server at site before we have any working in-band access,” said Ristimäki. CSC has already deployed Opengear ACM7004-5-LMR – Resilience Gateway appliances at around 10 locations across the country, which were initially used to help remotely configure networking equipment at sites connecting to its newly upgraded backbone network. Having a remote access server at distant locations makes it easier to reliably commission and configure new network equipment from its main offices at Espoo and Kajaani. At the final stage, there will be around 40 Opengear Resilience Gateway appliances across the country. INTELLIGENTCIO 13