Platform9 recently joined Intel’s Open Retail Initiative (ORI), a collaborative community of organizations using open-source projects and vendor-proprietary solutions to drive digital transformation in retail. The ORI’s mission is to enable retail transformation using open source, edge/IoT, and ISV ecosystem applications.

Platform9 also announced the launch of a new software-defined store solution to help retailers accelerate the deployment and management of the applications that support store consumer digital experiences. The solution now enables retailers to run a converged infrastructure stack in store – transforming each store into a software-defined mini-cloud which then abstracts 1000s of geographically distributed regions and stores into a single shared global cloud.

With the introduction of KubeVirt support (KubeVirt enables VMs to run on Kubernetes), the solution allows retailers to manage both containers and virtual machines with a cloud-native approach. Retailers can also ensure clusters are set up in an identical way across stores with the Platform9 Profile Engine, a new cluster governance and policy management feature.

Additionally, retailer DevOps teams are able to leverage CI/CD tooling, APIs, and an app catalog to simplify application management at scale.

Based on its experience deploying large-scale retail store solutions, Platform9 has also published a white paper titled “Enabling the Software-Driven Store: Solution Architecture for Cloud-Native Infrastructure and Operations,” providing a reference architecture that retailers can use for their own use cases.