B.TECH scales retail operations and slashes time-to-market by 30 percent with Microsoft Azure

B.TECH, a leading retailer in Egypt, specializes in household appliances and consumer electronics. It operates over 161 stores across 24 Egyptian governorates and collaborates with more than 600 dealers and distributors. Its portfolio includes international brands like Braun, Ariston, Miele, and Apple.

B.TECH seeks to become Egypt's foremost omnichannel retail platform, a vision that’s implemented by its internal digital transformation hub, b_labs. The company created its digital transformation roadmap seven years ago and continues to be fully committed to transforming the business digitally. Creating b_labs and empowering the group to implement change and push for progress is evidence of that commitment.

Scaling with the cloud

“What sparked the digital transformation was the need to automate the prioritized business areas and provide creative solutions,” shares Osama Abdelmoghni, Chief Technology Officer of b_labs. “We also needed to address performance issues with our on-premises infrastructure, especially during major events like Black Friday, which lasts 30 days here.”

As a first step to operational efficiency, B.TECH consolidated its two email servers onto Microsoft 365 as early as 2016. After that, the retailer optimized its infrastructure, which started a larger-scale cloud migration, supported by the Microsoft Architect team.

B.TECH used Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Disaster Recovery to scale cloud resources and ensure business continuity. This was especially critical during high-traffic events like Black Friday. "Before moving to Azure, Black Friday put our infrastructure team in panic mode," Abdelmoghni recalls. “They would see the on-premises resources hitting full capacity, and worried that orders would stop getting booked. Now we don’t have that problem. The team can easily scale resources up or down based on need, ensuring a smooth customer experience.”

With Azure, B.TECH has the resources it needs without being stuck with infrastructure that won’t be used once a major season’s surge is done. The main benefit of elasticity helped B.TECH increase service availability and achieve a 30 percent decrease in time–to market.

Robust infrastructure for the future

The move resulted in modernized infrastructure for B.TECH, which also achieved the goal of improving system restoration metrics, namely restore time objective and restore point objective. Azure also enabled the retailer to set up a disaster recovery (DR) site in the event of a system crash.

For security, B.TECH uses Microsoft Sentinel, Azure Firewall, and Defender for Servers to improve its security posture. This robust framework enables B.TECH to proactively manage security incidents to see and stop cyberthreats across the company with intelligent security analytics. The retailer also deployed Dynamics 365 Supply Chain to streamline processes and logistics. “With Dynamics 365, we can focus on operational excellence without worrying about technical complexity," notes Abdelmoghni. “We can also now provide dashboards and analytics, which will enable the company to monitor and achieve its targets.”

Bright cloud future ahead

B.TECH’s digital transformation is far from over. Having modernized its infrastructure, the company now plans to develop more cloud-native applications for its business. It also looks to further enhance collaboration and security with Microsoft 365 E5 and introduce Power Apps and Power BI, embedded within Microsoft Teams. “Given that B.TECH is a large organization, efficient collaboration tools are essential. With Power Platform, we’re starting to automate business processes to streamline work," Abdelmoghni sums up.