Californian multi-cloud Kubernetes-as-a-service company Platform9 has joined Intel’s Open Retail Initiative (ORI) and launched a software-defined store.

Designed to help retailers accelerate the rollout of store applications and improve digital experiences for consumers, Platform9’s offering lets retailers centrally manage store IT with a converged infrastructure stack.

Intel’s ORI is a collaborative community of organisations using open-source projects and vendor-proprietary technology to drive digital transformation in retail. The ORI’s mission is to enable retail transformation using open-source, edge, IoT and ISV ecosystem applications.

“The ORI’s commitment to open standards and industry collaboration aligns well with Platform9’s vision of delivering open source as a service on any infrastructure and enabling retailers to accelerate their software driven store initiatives,” said John Jamie, vice president of marketing at Platform9.

Platform9 launched its software-defined store designed to help retailers accelerate the deployment and management of the applications that support store consumer digital experiences. It enables retailers to run a converged infrastructure stack in store, transforming each store into a software-defined mini-cloud that then abstracts thousands of geographically distributed regions and stores into a single shared global cloud.

With the introduction of KubeVirt support that enables virtual machines (VMs) to run on Kubernetes, retailers can manage both containers and VMs 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 cluster governance and policy management feature. Additionally, retailer devops teams are able to leverage CI and CD tooling, APIs, and an app catalogue to simplify application management at scale.

Provided as a managed SaaS, Platform9’s retail offering is backed by cloud experts who offer round-the-clock proactive support.

“Consumers have come to expect an integrated, omnichannel digital retail experience in stores, at the kerbside and online,” said Sirish Raghuram, CEO of Platform9. “Many of these applications must run inside stores, due to latency, bandwidth or uptime considerations. Running this mix of traditional and modern apps across a store network with a distributed cloud-native architecture is uniquely supported by our technology. And, equally important, with Platform9 retailers enjoy a managed solution with 24/7 support.”

Based on its experience deploying large-scale retail store technology, Platform9 has published a white paper providing a reference architecture that retailers can use for their own use cases. Retailers can learn how to deploy and centrally manage any type of workload, such as containers, VMs or bare metal, across all their store locations, data centres and public clouds. It shows how a centrally deployed management plane orchestrates the delivery of various capabilities – containers, hypervisors, storage backends, network backends – to physical infrastructure using automation and operational tools.

“As a pilot for our retail solution, Platform9 helped one of the world’s largest coffee chains use devops automation and CI and CD tool chains to centrally and automatically deploy applications such as order management, video surveillance and music delivery to thousands of their coffee stores,” said Raghuram. “At the end of the day, they chose us because we could accelerate their ability to deploy innovative applications with both a faster time to market than building an internal solution, and a lower TCO than using other commercial solutions which were not architected for distributed retail environments.”

Platform9 is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is backed by venture firms including Redpoint Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Canvas Ventures, NGP Capital, Mubadala Capital and Celesta Capital.