Dunkin' Donuts: 'Without partner-provided cloud infrastructure, we'd be left behind'

Darrell Riekena explains how Verizon cloud is helping the doughnut and coffee house innovate as it expands

Dunkin' Donuts, the American doughnut and coffee house chain, has deployed Verizon's "cloud computing for business" solution in an effort to future-proof its infrastructure as it looks to expand across the globe.

Responsibility for the IT infrastructure behind Dunkin' brands - Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin Robbins, the world's largest chain of ice cream shops - falls to supply chain management company National DCP (NCDP), and it's up to CIO Darrell Riekena to ensure the operation runs smoothly.

"It's a question of how do we stay ahead, how do we continue to meet needs and keep the costs down for our franchises, giving them the most bandwidth we can at the lowest cost. They want the fastest, largest pipe but want the cost to keep going down," he told Computing.

The partnership with Verizon began as part of a store connectivity initiative that Riekena described as "a really great experience for us" and which saw his team working alongside Verizon to roll out systems across over 6,000 stores.

"We're a small IT shop - less than 50 people - so that proved to be a good joint venture with them. They just felt a part of the team and they looked out for our company as well as their own," he explained. "They came to know us and we are a bit of a unique beast given that there's Dunkin' corporate and NDCP and franchises; they learned how to deal with all that."

Therefore, when it came to selecting a cloud provider, Riekena explained that after examining offerings from other vendors, choosing Verizon was "a natural evolution", and that "it felt good to continue the relationship".

The decision to move the Dunkin' Donuts IT infrastructure to the cloud was made because internally built legacy systems were over 10 years old and had become "very fragile". The shift to the cloud also came as the company moved its headquarters from Boston to Atlanta, which meant the "out-of-the-box" solution meant "we didn't have to build a new data centre", said Riekena.

For Dunkin' Donuts, the cloud-based IT infrastructure has enabled the company to become much more flexible and to more quickly scale and react to surges in demand.

"It's much like retail where there are promotional activities throughout the year, with the need for increased computing and processing power," Riekena explained, adding that the ability to scale quickly will help Dunkin' Donuts expand - without breaking the bank.

"If we had to provision our own servers we would've had to buy upfront and think about growth two years from now. But with the cloud model, it grows with you, you pay for what you use, so it's very economical for us," Riekena said, before going on to describe how it also helps Dunkin' Donuts run infrastructure for new IT projects.

"It's easy to spin up new environments that you can run on the side and let people work on," he explained. "It's a very economical model for us that allows us to flex it up or down based on our needs and grows with us as we continue to grow as a company."

In addition to lower cost and flexibility, the move to cloud has allowed Dunkin' Donuts to invest in big data and analytics tools that can be used to help supply chain management.

"The way we've tried to structure our systems, historically there was the big data warehouse and we pulled data from all different systems. Now with the in-memory analytics and other processing tools, you don't have to move data around as much, it's more about the processing power behind it," explained Riekena.

Ultimately, he told Computing, the deployment of cloud computing services from Verizon will allow Dunkin' Donuts to stay on top of the latest developments and innovations in IT infrastructure, which will in turn help the company expand.

"I don't know how independent companies can develop applications and stay current with infrastructure at the pace at which it is moving," Riekena said.

"Particularly for companies like ours with a smaller IT shop, we just can't develop the talent or the people to stay ahead of that. So I think without relying on partners to do that, we'd be left behind if we didn't do it," he concluded.