The cooperation of Pchilka Market shop network with a large amount of suppliers is grounded on the corporate email. Even the tiniest glitch means issues with payment and goods delivery. In this article, we show how a GigaCloud cloud in the EU helps to avoid it.

Pchilka Market is a network of 36 product shops in Kyiv, the Kyiv region, Chernihiv and Zhytomyr. It works as a ‘shop around the corner’ and offers goods, processed food and ready-to-eat meals.

Communication with hundreds of suppliers

Pchilka Market cooperates with hundreds of suppliers, daily buys and realizes thousands of goods units, and a corporate mail is one of the tools to communicate with them.

If the mail doesn’t work for a couple of hours, it will be impossible for the company to coordinate the price of goods with the supplier and, accordingly, to receive it. The email is also required at times when goods are lacking or there is no invoice — and sorting it out with the supplier is, once again, possible via email. Hence, it was important for the company to have a mail server working smoothly.

“For a long time, we cooperated with a third party which provided us with a mail client. But at the beginning of the full-scale war, they crashed, and the supplier couldn’t provide us with an adequate level of service. And we decided to replace it”, says Vadym Kuzmenko, Pchilka Market CIO.

Trusted partner

Up to that moment, Pchilka Market had been using the services of GigaCloud cloud operator for several years. In a VMware-based public cloud, located at the EU site, separate infrastructure elements are deployed.

“For us, it is crucial that the accounting software is always available, as our accountants work with it daily”, says Vadym Kuzmenko, Pchilka Market CIO. “For this reason, we hosted it in a GigaCloud cloud. The provider was selected on the basis of its reputation on the market, work experience and real client reviews”.

That is why when it was the turn to change the mail server, the company contacted GigaCloud. The provider offered the company a mail server based on Zimbra software and technologies. It is a wholesome tool for communication and collective work, which includes mail boxes, calendar, internal chats etc. Pchilka Market experts created over 500 mail boxes there.

With the business scale-up, emergence of new tasks and information increase, they decided to switch to a more functional and protected solution, a Zimbra mail server, deployed on the basis of the public cloud in the EU, where an accounting software, database, and other services of the customer have already been operating.

Since the mail server took a lot of resources, it took about three months to prepare for the migration of mailboxes and data to the cloud. After the GigaCloud experts set everything up properly, the actual migration process began. It took three days. However, during all this time, employees continued to use the mail.

The largest Pchilka Market shop in Kyiv, at Vatslava Havela Blvd, 18

Advantages for cloud hosting

Now, the Pchilka Market IT infrastructure has a hybrid model: a part of services is located at an on-prem server, another one — in the cloud.

The company claims that the possibility to flexibly increase the amount of computing resources allows for fast scaling up and working more efficiently. One can integrate new features into services and not worry that there will not be enough capacity.

In the absence of electricity or the internet in the office, you can access the company's email domain from any device and use it from a browser.

The need to purchase additional equipment was also gone. Renting cloud resources relieves you from capital costs, and allows you to direct the freed-up funds to business development. Also, there is currently an acute shortage of qualified specialists who could properly administer the equipment. All these tasks can be transferred to the duties of the cloud provider.

In addition, Pchilka Market uses a backup service that allows them to utilize the cloud operator's repository to store backup copies.

“During all the years of cooperation with GigaCloud, we did not experience any long-term disruptions in the work of the IT infrastructure, our services worked, and so did our stores,” says Vadym Kuzmenko, Pchilka Market CIO. “Technical support responds quickly, so if any questions arise, we promptly resolve them, which does not affect the company's work”.