Since opening its first New Zealand store in 1974, Mitre 10 has grown into the country’s largest home improvement retailer. It’s now a cooperative comprising 85 stores from Kaitaia to Invercargill and employing more than 8,000 people.
Managing the IT systems for such a large operation is complex, and Mitre 10 has always been an early adopter of technology. It was one of the first organisations in Aotearoa to fully embrace the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it’s been a foundational platform as the company has expanded.
“When we went to the cloud, we transformed the way we operated, coming off a large infrastructure footprint,” says Glen Priest, Head of Digital Services & Platforms at Mitre 10.
“We’re now migrating to SAP across all our stores, migrating from 67 individual ERP systems, and the glue that hangs it all together is AWS.”
In 2024, the Mitre 10 team decided to upskill on AWS and see if they could get even more value out of the platform.
“It’s been tough over the last couple of years in retail, and optimising costs is an absolute imperative,” says Priest.
AWS put him in touch with Datacom, and he was connected to Dinesh Sharma, AWS Regional Practice Lead for Datacom. Sharma spent four months working at Mitre 10, alongside the embedded AWS team, and together the three organisations undertook an impressive transformation. In just four months, they found improvements that led to huge savings for the business.
“We had a cost savings focus so we identified every opportunity that could help Mitre 10 achieve savings,” says Sharma. “We all worked brilliantly as a team, and we were able to deliver an awesome outcome.”
Datacom’s Associate Director for Cloud Transformation, Russell Page-Wood, says a successful project enables organisations to reset and find better ways of working that can deliver tangible benefits.
"When cloud environments have been in business-as-usual mode for some time we often find there is opportunity for optimisations and consolidations to drive cost savings. Our approach is different, in that we don't build a report or just give our customers a dashboard that is hard to execute. We provide the engineering excellence that enables them to implement the recommendations that will drive the savings while at the same time ensuring productions systems are not impacted."
The combined Mitre 10, AWS and Datacom teams streamlined workflows, optimised network configurations, and implemented robust cloud management practices.
“It was a fantastic example of bringing together specialist expertise to achieve an outstanding outcome for Mitre 10,” says AWS Country Manager, New Zealand, Manuel Bohnet. “Leveraging the local expertise of our partner Datacom, and our extensive experience in retailer transformation, we were able to support Mitre 10’s modernisation journey on the cloud and set them up for ongoing success. Mitre 10 is also a really forward-thinking organisation, and their team has made a major contribution to the success of this work.”
Saving so much in operating costs has obviously been an enormous benefit to Mitre 10, but the improvements go beyond just the financial. Priest’s team no longer needed to manage and monitor a large number of widgets, and the overall infrastructure footprint is now smaller.
“Manual patching was taking one of our guys out for a week each month,” says Priest. “I could see the change in that person, as soon as we started to automate the patching – we’ve freed him up from what is a mundane task, so he’s able to do more high-value work. That’s how you can see automation changing people’s worlds.”
The work also resulted in security enhancements across Mitre 10, as automation ensures the system is always up to date.
“Manual updating can leave a system with vulnerabilities, so automatic updating ensures everyone can sleep better at night,” says AWS Senior Solutions Architect, Imran Sadiq. “Improving the cyber maturity at Mitre 10 helps reduce the risk of a breach, which is vital for such a well-loved consumer brand.”
Mitre 10 is now working on its major SAP migration, which will give the company far deeper data insights – with one system for stock, sales and pipeline and a ‘single pane’ for viewing it all. That will be another transformation, says Priest, with Datacom and AWS providing continuing support as the programme of work rolls out.
“Dinesh and the Datacom team gave us fresh thinking – looking at how we could run the environment better and differently,” says Priest. “Our internal team is small, so being able to call on the wisdom of Datacom and AWS as partners is very significant for us. Together we were able to absolutely take a blow torch to what we had been doing. The immediate impact was on my team, but it’s fair to say that impact is now expanding into the architecture teams and beyond.”
He adds that optimising the company’s use of AWS will be an ongoing undertaking for the business; unlike legacy on-prem server systems, cloud infrastructure requires “feeding, watering and keeping evergreen”. But with AWS and Datacom on board, Priest feels confident that Mitre 10 can continuously improve as it looks ahead to the next strategic initiative.
“Working with Datacom was frictionless – [the Practice Lead] Dinesh integrated into the team and the leadership,” says Priest. “It’s also been frictionless with AWS. Would I personally recommend investing in the level of support we have with AWS? Absolutely, it’s a no brainer for me.”
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