Teamwork Retail: using Microsoft Azure and AppScale to provide the next-gen retail experience

As consumer demands and expectations change, the retail sales environment is also changing, and Teamwork Retail is at the forefront of that transformation. The company provides businesses of all sizes with cloud-based retail point-of-sale (POS) and business management solutions that change the way retailers interact with their customers and manage their businesses.

Using Teamwork Retail, businesses can perform mobile and integrated POS transactions while also managing back-of-the-house activities such as inventory levels, sales analytics, and human resource functions like employee timecards and scheduling. In addition, Teamwork Retail offers its clients omnichannel servicing for their customers, seamlessly providing customer data and information regardless of how customers interact with the retailers. Teamwork Retail’s clients have come to rely on its technological solutions to better serve their customers.

How Microsoft Azure and AppScale helped Teamwork Retail open the door to China

With a population of nearly 1.5 billion and a swiftly expanding consumer base, China is irresistible to retailers. In fact, A.T. Kearney again ranked China number one in its 2016 Global Retail Development Index, which rates developing countries by retail attractiveness, risk, and other parameters. In today’s retail environment, global organizations seek opportunities in China. Many of Teamwork Retail’s clients were either already operating in or planning to expand to China.

The challenge Teamwork Retail faced was that its solution is cloud-based and was built on Google App Engine. Google App Engine can only be used on Google Cloud Platform, which cannot be used in China because of government regulatory controls. Teamwork Retail tried connecting through Taiwan, but the arrangement did not work well.

To better serve its clients and offer its services to retailers operating in China, Teamwork Retail engaged AppScale, a Microsoft ISV, to help. AppScale is the only software that allows for the portability from Google App Engine to Microsoft Azure without any code modifications. It is also the world’s leading open-source, rapid development model for building scalable web and mobile applications. Teaming with AppScale, Teamwork Retail seamlessly moved its applications from Google App Engine to Microsoft Azure, running them on AppScale and operating in Azure’s datacenter.

When the cloud solutions were evaluated, Microsoft Azure was chosen for deployment to ensure optimal application performance and the required ability to scale as needed. Latency needed to be extremely low, and performance and reliability levels needed to be high—and Azure’s Beijing datacenter satisfied those requirements. In addition to its global capability, Azure provided the local support and service model that Teamwork Retail needed and the ability to create a hybrid environment to integrate with its current infrastructure.

“Microsoft provides a white-glove level of service with Azure that enabled Teamwork Retail to make the most efficient use of cloud services,” AppScale CEO Woody Rollins said about the migration.

After the migration, Teamwork Retail was better able to offer its products and services to Chinese retailers and other global retailers operating in China. It has also gained new business and, as a result, significantly expanded its client base.

Taking full advantage of AppScale’s and Azure’s benefits expands business

Now that Teamwork Retail is operating in China through AppScale in Azure, the company is taking full advantage of the expanded services and capabilities. Teamwork Retail now offers its clients functionality they didn’t have before the migration. This includes the ability to offer loyalty programs or notifications to customers about retail events to engage with and build their customer base—while at the same time giving them that omnichannel view of their customer base.

“The whole value is built around the performance,” said Michael Mauerer, CEO of Teamwork Retail. “We need to meet this extremely high online performance across any channel, and this technology just really lends itself to that. So, that’s the secret sauce, and AppScale made that possible by migrating to Azure.”

Prior to the migration to Azure, Teamwork Retail’s offering was strictly POS and did not have the real-time interactive component that now distinguishes the company as a leader in the retail technology space.