Global restaurant chain dishes on the benefits of cloud computing

The Vapiano story began in October 2002, when the first restaurant opened its doors in Hamburg, Germany. Today, there are more than 185 Vapianos in 31 countries on five continents, with a business model that incorporates franchise, joint-venture, and corporate-owned arrangements. From the outset, the Vapiano “guest journey” was different: upon arrival, guests receive a card, which they take to different stations to order pasta, pizza, salads, and drinks. At each station, chefs prepare food in front of the guests. At the end of the meal, guests take their cards to the cash register to make their payment.

“Our dining experience is fast, fresh, and friendly, but with fewer people managing the front of the house, we have always relied more on technology than traditional restaurants,” says Jeroen Timmer, Director of Global IT and Process Management at Vapiano. “Initially, we housed our servers at our headquarters in Bonn. As we expanded, restaurant owners and managers around the world found it difficult to connect to headquarters via our VPN solution. Storage costs were booming. And with only 12 IT staffers to manage the additional infrastructure required to open 330 restaurants by 2020, we needed to reassess our IT strategy in order to achieve our goals.”

Finding the right cloud platform

In addition to expanding its global footprint, Vapiano wanted to introduce new customer services to attract today’s technically savvy millennial customers. However, capitalizing on industry trends such as mobile apps, a virtual smart-card payment system, and online ordering would require additional IT infrastructure and expertise. Vapiano’s long-time IT partner Obungi—a member of the Microsoft Partner Network specializing in data, analytics, and the cloud—suggested the company adopt the Microsoft Azure platform to take advantage of cloud computing, and Vapiano readily agreed.

“We saw Microsoft Azure as a way to transform our business so that we could reduce routine administration and focus on opening restaurants and providing a great guest experience,” says Timmer. “We could avoid having to manage infrastructure and have a scalable IT solution to support global expansion and the deployment of new services at all our restaurants. Obungi has always understood our business, and the move to a modern, flexible computing platform like Azure is its latest strategic idea to deliver tangible benefits.”

Vapiano briefly evaluated renting dedicated hardware, but this proposal was more expensive than moving its entire IT environment to Azure. Also, the Azure platform meets the requisite data privacy and security standards. “Because we have our applications running in Europe, personal data security is very important,” says Timmer. “Microsoft datacenters comply with European data security legislation and it has worked really well for us.”

At the same time, Vapiano is deploying Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E5 at its headquarters, where it will introduce Cloud PBX in Skype for Business for making, receiving, and transferring calls anywhere without dedicated infrastructure. Later, it will deploy Office 365 to staff at its restaurants. “The interoperability of Microsoft cloud solutions is a real benefit,” says Timmer. “Having one cloud platform streamlines the deployment and management of new apps that are key to the evolution of our business.”

Building an extensible hybrid cloud environment

Vapiano began its journey to Azure by taking advantage of the hybrid cloud approach, where it could optimize its existing investments, while moving to the cloud. Obungi cloud experts migrated the most resource-intensive workloads to Azure first, beginning with an enterprise data warehouse running on Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition that supports the company’s business intelligence (BI) solution, its websites—running on four virtual machines hosting Internet Information Services—and its mobile apps. The data warehouse incorporates four DS 12 virtual machines using Azure Premium Storage and configured as a SQL Server Always On Availability Group to improve redundancy. The data warehouse functions as a back end to approximately 30 API operations that suppliers or external systems use to call Vapiano back-end systems.

Obungi also migrated Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 R2 to the Azure platform, where the solution runs on two virtual machines and orchestrates all the API requests to the data warehouse, a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, the restaurants, and the BI solution. The BI solution includes an additional virtual machine that hosts SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Server Analysis Services and delivers reports to approximately 200 Vapiano employees.

The Azure environment is integrated into the on-premises Active Directory at Vapiano through Azure Active Directory. Obungi also installed Azure Active Directory Federation Services for authentication into the Office 365 environment. Today, Vapiano runs a hybrid Microsoft Exchange and Skype for Business environment, but it has migrated its Microsoft SharePoint environment to the cloud. In addition, Vapiano is rolling out a new point-of-sales (POS) solutions that will run on-premises in each restaurant.

“Obungi designed our hybrid cloud environment to abstract the logic from our business applications so that they only have to call the correct API to communicate with the data warehouse, the CRM solution, the BI solution, or the restaurants themselves,” says Timmer. “This abstraction layer gives us an extensible platform to easily add functionality that supports new business strategies. The hybrid approach, with on-premises and cloud solutions all managed with a single user identity and management solution, simplifies our move to the cloud.”

Supporting innovation in fast-casual dining

Today, Vapiano has a more flexible, scalable, and agile computing environment, so it can expand its business and introduce new services to boost the Vapiano guest experience. “We’re taking a leadership role in launching new trends in the fast-casual restaurant business, such as online orders, mobile apps, in-store kiosks and virtual smart cards, thanks to the Azure platform,” says Timmer. “Now Vapiano has a cost-effective, agile computing environment to help meet our goal of opening 330 restaurants by 2020.”

Time-to-market is faster, too, with new services coming online more quickly, helping Vapiano to build an impressive competitive advantage. Since the introduction of its cloud computing environment, the company has launched three services: an online ordering feature that’s driving a completely new revenue source; a CRM loyalty system where guests download a mobile app called Vapiano People and use it to get discounts and accrue points when they order in the restaurant; and a system where guests who don’t wish to watch their food being cooked can order at a restaurant kiosk and sit at a table to wait until they are buzzed to pick up their meal.

“The innovations in the Vapiano dining experience that we’re introducing are all made possible by the central logic hosted in Azure,” says Timmer. “Time-to-market is significantly reduced, thanks to the short lead time required to introduce new hardware and systems in a hybrid cloud environment.”

And as Obungi begins to take advantage of more platform-as-a-service offerings in Azure, its developers will accelerate the pace of business innovation for Vapiano. Obungi is beginning to replace virtual machines with Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database, a managed cloud database for app developers that accelerates the introduction of new web, mobile, and API apps.

Making better business decisions

Since migrating the BI solution to the cloud, Vapiano reduced storage costs and gained a single hybrid, integrated data warehouse that provides insight into customer behavior based on new information gathered from its CRM, POS, and loyalty systems.

“Now we’re looking at how much revenue customers in the loyalty program generate, we’re analyzing the efficacy of our marketing campaigns, and we’re beginning to predict customer behavior—all based on transactional data from restaurants’ POS combined with data from the loyalty system,” says Timmer.

And instead of using the VPN to tunnel into on-premises systems individually, restaurant managers have all the data they need to make better business decisions in a web portal. Vapiano is also planning on using Microsoft Power BI, a cloud-based suite of business analytics tools available as part of Office 365, to extend its business intelligence solution to a mobile platform. “When we tell our franchise owners and restaurant managers that they’ll be able to use their smartphones to view restaurant turnover, productivity, and POS stats in real time, they’ll be thrilled. Being able to offer franchisees a state-of-the-art IT solution is just one more reason that Vapiano sees Microsoft hybrid cloud technologies as key to building our business in a digital age.”

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About Obungi

Obungi GmbH is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Hamburg, Germany, and a specialist for data and analytics, cloud strategy and custom business solutions.