Transforming the Pizza Business: Maestro Pizza's Digital Revolution

In a bold move to redefine the quick-serve restaurant industry, Saudi Arabia's Maestro Pizza by Daily Food Co has embraced the Veeam Data Platform on AWS, transforming its IT landscape. With an eye on innovation and efficiency, the leading pizza chain has not only achieved substantial savings on IT operational and capital expenses but has also revolutionized market delivery times. The strategic deployment of this technology underscores Maestro Pizza's commitment to being at the cutting edge of the industry and positions them as a disruptive force in Saudi Arabia's fast-growing market.

At Server Simply, we are proud to collaborate with Veeam, leveraging their robust solutions to enhance our data management and security capabilities. This partnership enables us to provide our clients with advanced backup and recovery options, bolstering their overall data protection strategy. By harnessing Veeam's cutting-edge technology, we can offer our customers peace of mind and reliable solutions for safeguarding their critical business data.

Embracing Technology for Market Disruption

In its pursuit of excellence and market domination, Saudi Arabia's Maestro Pizza by Daily Food Co adopted the Veeam Data Platform on cloud, resulting in substantial savings on both operational and capital IT expenses. This move also had a revolutionary effect on market delivery times.

Founded in 2013, Maestro Pizza quickly rose to prominence as a leading quick-serve restaurant chain in Saudi Arabia, boasting over 180 stores nationwide. As the most recognizable pizza brand in the country, it has cemented its place as a favorite among consumers.

The company has always been at the forefront of technological innovation in the quick-serve restaurant sector. Its commitment to this mission led to the introduction of an e-commerce model for customer convenience and, in 2016, the launch of the first mobile ordering and delivery apps in Saudi Arabia.

With a workforce of 2,300 employees and a fleet of over 600 delivery vehicles, Maestro Pizza's operations are steeped in technology. Various proprietary applications have been developed to streamline operations, from order tracking to delivery. As Omar Homsi, Head of ICT, emphasizes, "Every single order goes through our IT systems."

While technology is the cornerstone of Maestro Pizza's business model, its aggressive expansion within Saudi Arabia did lead to some challenges in data management operations. The company's journey exemplifies the balancing act between innovation and operational efficiency that is essential to modern business success.

Transforming IT Operations for Seamless Scaling

Faced with performance limitations in its legacy data backup and restore solution, Maestro Pizza found itself grappling with the unavailability of its Point of Sales (POS) application framework for several hours. This outage led to missed orders and lost revenue opportunities, shedding light on the immediate need for a new solution.

Homsi, a key figure in the company, details the distressing instance when they were unable to take a single order for an extended period. The uncertainty around the data restore operation's success became a pressing concern.

As the business expanded, another potential failure point emerged: the central database that aggregated data from stores nationwide. Any failure at this pivotal point in IT operations could lead to a complete cessation of the country's operations, as all the stores depended on this centralized database.

Acknowledging the risk, the team recognized that a failure to swiftly restore this central point would cripple their operations, leaving them blind to customer orders and unable to support their tickets.

In response to these challenges, Maestro Pizza embarked on a significant transformation of its IT architecture, platforms, and environment. Moving away from a data center-reliant IT platform with a disaster recovery site model, the company embraced a cloud-based architecture using the AWS public cloud hyperscaler platform.

Additionally, Maestro Pizza's IT team chose to enhance their system with more virtual machines (VMs) and extend virtualization across its future platform. The new direction dictated that any future data backup and restore solution must be compatible with virtualization and hyperscaler cloud architecture, shaping the essential criteria for the selection of a new data backup and restore solution.

Streamlining Operations with Veeam

Maestro Pizza chose the Veeam Data Platform to bolster its growing operations, deploying the platform after a week of testing. The entire implementation process, remarkably completed by just one IT professional, was brought live in under three days. Maestro Pizza leveraged Veeam's features such as SureBackup and SureReplica, enhancing its functionality.

Homsi's endorsement of the system as working "like magic" underlines the smooth migration of Maestro Pizza's data to AWS with Veeam's hosting. He praised AWS for effortlessly protecting, managing, and controlling their data.

The ongoing challenge for organizations is the escalating complexity and cost of backup and recovery solutions as their data expands. Traditional methods often lead to difficulties in meeting recovery times, incurring more time, administrative efforts, and cost resources. This impacts overall business performance and can leave organizations vulnerable.

However, the integration of backup and recovery solutions with AWS, like Veeam Software, has dramatically improved operational efficiency. By enabling seamless usability, rapid backup times, and simplifying data recovery, these solutions reduce infrastructure and management expenses.

API integration with Amazon's storage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon S3 Standard, and Amazon Glacier offers a cloud-integrated, efficient backup, and recovery solution with pay-as-you-go pricing. This approach yields substantial cost savings compared to traditional on-premises options.

Maestro Pizza's IT team found the Veeam Data Platform's ease of use invaluable, saving many resource hours. Features like SureBackup and SureReplica automated the backup process, ensuring the integrity of backups. Additionally, Veeam's ability to encapsulate all images into one helped the IT team recover quickly when vital systems failed, such as restoring a non-functional VM supporting the ERP system in just 30 minutes.

Comparatively, Homsi noted that such a swift recovery would have been impossible with their old solution. Moreover, Maestro Pizza discovered that the entire POS system could now be restored in less than an hour, a remarkable improvement from the several hours required with their previous legacy system.

Unlocking Innovation and Cost Efficiency

The deployment of Veeam Data Platform on AWS by Maestro Pizza led to an impressive 60% reduction in IT operating costs. This substantial savings has not only created additional funds but also freed up time for the IT team to innovate in other sectors.

One notable example of this innovation is Maestro Pizza's implementation of an AI-driven approach to manage the extensive camera surveillance data across all their locations in Saudi Arabia.

By transitioning to the Veeam Data Platform on AWS, Maestro Pizza reaped the benefits of a pay-as-you-go operational expenditure (OpEx) model, as opposed to the capital expenditure model of its previous legacy data systems. Omar Homsi, the Head of ICT at Maestro Pizza, calculates that this OpEx model has slashed the company's IT capital expenditure by 30%. The flexibility provided by Veeam, allowing the choice between hardware storage on-premises or cloud-based storage, further contributes to the potential savings of tens of thousands of dollars.

Such significant cost reductions have bolstered Maestro Pizza's ability to disrupt the Saudi market competitively. Their commitment to 30-minute deliveries and 10-minute order readiness is underpinned by the confidence that Veeam provides.

While the financial savings and efficiency gains are remarkable, Maestro Pizza emphasizes that the primary advantage of utilizing the Veeam Data Platform is the enhancement in conducting business more effectively and efficiently.

Homsi commends Veeam for surpassing expectations in both customer support and technology, describing them as being ahead of the market. More than anything, Veeam's contribution to delivering happiness to pizza lovers daily summarizes the core value of this partnership, as articulated by Homsi.