Domino’s: IT outsourcing ‘crucial to resilience’

Domino’s Pizza has said that a move to cloud computing, and the outsourcing of a number of its key IT elements, are crucial steps to providing “resilient” and “flexible” technology as it grows its business.

In the last year, the pizza firm has moved its fast-growing e-commerce site onto servers hosted by Rackspace, and outsourced the management of its wide area network to KCom. Domino’s retains an in-house IT department for more “strategic” work.

As the company reported that it had grown revenues by 12% to £102 million, in the six months to 26 June, it said online sales accounted for 42% of all delivery revenues. The right IT infrastructure was vital to support the e-commerce channel and other operations, it said.

“Quality is not just about pizza and one of the other areas where we have looked to improve quality is in our IT infrastructure,” it told investors. “During the period, we announced a programme to outsource some of our IT infrastructure which will result in a more resilient, more flexible system to protect this key element of our business going forward.”

Domino’s spent just over £1 million on restructuring and reorganisation in the last 18 months, which it said was a result of the IT and process review prompted by online growth. It is aiming for e-commerce sales to represent over two-thirds of revenues by 2015, with one in eight sales coming through mobile channels.

Three weeks ago, Domino’s announced that it was moving its e-commerce site, online payment gateway, corporate e-mail and back-office systems into the cloud on servers hosted by RackSpace, with the aim of increasing scalability and saving money.

In June, it signed a three year contract with supplier KCom for the management of its wide area network, which connects over 670 Domino’s franchise stories in the UK and Ireland. The pizza firm said it was moving to a more advanced ’21st Century’ network that would allow it to use more complex networked applications.

Domino’s is also working with supplier Computacenter to roll out new electronic point of sale (EPOS) systems across its UK stores, with cash and workflow management capabilities.