“Going onto the public cloud allows us to scale up and down to adjust for changes in demand, which is especially important for businesses like us in the F&B industry. What’s more, Azure enables us to engage with our customers much more dynamically and I would say, on a more personal level. The messages we push out can now be more targeted, and we can push them out while customizing them incorporating real-time elements. This is the type of technology that brings us closer to our customers, and our customers to us.”

Ravel Lai, Group IT Director, Jardine Restaurant Group Hong Kong and Macao

Business OverviewWhen it comes to pizza delivery, Pizza Hut Hong Kong is usually one of the first brands that come to mind for the majority of people in the city. Originally founded in the U.S., Pizza Hut was brought to Hong Kong in 1987 by Jardine Restaurant Group and had been operated by the Group ever since. The Group is one of Hong Kong’s leading restaurant groups with over 680 outlets and 21,000 employees across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Macao. The household pizza brand serves a diverse range of Italian-themed dishes, including different variations of pizzas and pastas, and often refreshes its menu so as to provide new, fun and exciting experiences for its customers. With over 80 outlets in Hong Kong and Macao offering dine-in, take-out and delivery options, Pizza Hut is also the city’s largest pizza restaurant chain.

According to Ravel Lai, Group IT Director of Jardine Restaurant Group, Pizza Hut was looking for a partner that could help them transform digitally, in view of the rise of mobile and the potential that the brand could tap into. With Microsoft Azure, the brand successfully transformed their digital strategy and now enjoys unprecedented scalability that enables them to cater for the sudden burst of traffic during peak hours and holidays as well as to optimize cost-efficiency.

SituationPizza Hut’s digital journey started all the way back in 2006, where it started to host its own physical servers to provide online

ordering services for its customers. In the first year when the option was first made available, the sales generated from it accounted for only 10% of the total revenue from delivery orders. The demand for online ordering steadily grew in the following years, prompting the chain to virtualize its own servers for better cost efficiency and scalability. However, with the boom of smart devices and the increasing Internet penetration rate of Hong Kong, the demand for Pizza Hut’s online ordering services grew exponentially. While on the surface it was a boon, Pizza Hut soon found hosting servers on their own was not a sustainable option. The realization drove Pizza Hut to use local datacentre services when they launched their first generation Online Order site since 2006.

In August 2015, a critical datacenter failure brought down the servers hosting the services of Pizza Hut. The unexpected downtime not only resulted in the restaurant chain incurring an estimated loss of over HK$ 1 million from sales in single day, it also damaged customer confidence. In the following two months, Pizza Hut lost an additional HK$2 million to bring its services back to full operational capacity. “The incident made us look for an alternative – one that guarantees a high level of SLA and redundancy. That way, if and when anything goes south, our services would not be affected,” said Lai.

Pizza Hut also wanted to take the opportunity to upgrade its CRM system to make use of social features for more responsive and interactive customer

Customer: Pizza Hut Hong Kong, operated by Jardine Restaurant GroupWebsite: http://www.pizzahut.com.hk/en/homeNumber of Staff: More than 4,000 staff in 80 outlets in both Hong Kong and MacaoCountry or Region: Hong KongIndustry: Food & Beverage

Customer ProfilePizza Hut Hong Kong was bought by Jardine Matheson in 1987 and today it is the largest Italian restaurant chain in Hong Kong. Since its arrival, Pizza Hut Hong Kong has strived to provide high quality dine-in, take-out and delivery options for its customers.

SolutionMicrosoft Azure

Benefit highlights Unprecented Scalability and Flexibility Effective, Insights-based Marketing

Strategies Made Possible Multi-vendor Hybrid Cloud

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:https://customers.microsoft.com/

Microsoft AzureCustomer Solution Case Study

Hong Kong’s Largest Pizza Chain Goes Cloud, Grabs a Bigger Slice of the Market with Azure

engagement, while getting faster and better insights into its customers’ preferences.

SolutionPizza Hut, with the help of a mobile application solution partner, started to transform their IT with Microsoft Azure in mid-2015. The chain built its server and database functionalities to Azure and launched a new social CRM platform in the form of a mobile app for its customers to easily engage with the brand.

The new app, which queries Pizza Hut’s database on Azure, replaces the old physical membership card, and provides customers with new experiences that are enabled by smart devices, such as the ability to obtain a restaurantly queueing ticket remotely, and to share loyalty program points between friends and family.

BenefitsThe digital transformation journey has so far provided Pizza Hut with a multitude of benefits, including:

Unprecedented Scalability and Flexibility“Going onto the public cloud allows us to scale up and down to adjust for changes in demand. On any given day, we may have a set number of VMs running on Azure for our mobile app services, but when a public holiday is around the corner, we can easily scale up in advance to ensure we have adequate resources to service all our customers even if demand surges. Configuring new VM instances take only minutes,” said Lai.

Public cloud services such as Azure are uniquely capable of scaling dynamically. Azure as a public cloud and IaaS solution lets Pizza Hut configure for new resources in just a few minutes without affecting normal operations. Apart from helping Pizza Hut save on operational cost, precious manpower has also been freed from infrastructure planning and management.

“Using the last Mother’s Day as an example: we anticipated to see a spike in demand on that day as we knew many of our customers would be ordering pizza as a way to let their mother or their children’s mother ‘take a break’ from preparing dinner. For that we pushed an online promotion campaign via the mobile app to amplify the results. Prior to Mother’s Day, we scheduled the deployment of more VMs to handle the millions of anticipated requests. The day went by with no hiccups, and after that we

just resumed normal operations by scaling down our VM count,” added Lai.

Effective, Insights-based Marketing Strategies Made PossibleThrough the app, Pizza Hut may send notifications directly to its customers. This function opens a wide window of opportunity for Pizza Hut to run unplanned campaigns in reaction to spontaneous events such as weather phenomenon.

“Azure enables us to engage with our customers much more dynamically. The messages we push out can now be more targeted, and we can push them out while customizing them incorporating real-time elements and I would say, on a more personal level. This is the type of technology that brings us closer to our customers, and our customers to us,” said Lai.

On a rainy day or an exceptionally breezy day, Pizza Hut could send a message to its customers to encourage them to stay indoors and order pizza. “We can do ad-hoc campaign in the morning, measure and get data on customer sentiments by lunch, and run reports with analysis by the end of day. This data-driven approach to evaluating success was not possible without our move to Azure.”

Greater Than The Sum of PartsThe IT infrastructure at Pizza Hut was made up of parts from various vendors. To Pizza Hut, one key advantage of working with Microsoft is the ability to seamlessly merge Azure with its existing deployment to form a hybrid solution. “Migration was made easy. And better yet, we’re getting the best of both worlds,” said Lai.

“We learned our lesson. By moving to Azure, we’re no longer vulnerable to single points of failure. Availability sets can easily be configured for Azure VMs, so our services will only have minimal impact – if at all – in instances where equipment fails. Microsoft also offers enterprise grade SLAs and round-the-clock tech support, further boosting our confidence with them and their services. We’re glad to have moved to Azure.”

Ravel Lai, Group IT Director, Jardine Restaurant Group Hong Kong and Macao

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published September 2016