A reliable, high-performance, cloud-native platform supporting the overhaul of a proprietary ERP system and the digital transformation of a national retail network.
To support its digital transformation project and the gradual overhaul of a nearly 50-year-old proprietary ERP system, the RICHARDSON Group teamed up with Nutanix for a complete IT infrastructure overhaul. By adopting a unified hyperconverged platform designed to support both traditional virtualization and Kubernetes environments, the company has enhanced its stability, performance, and operational agility. The result is a reliable, low-maintenance infrastructure for day-to-day operations and a sustainable technological foundation to support the group’s transformation journey through 2029.
Key benefits:
RICHARDSON, a Marseille-based family business founded in 1855 and specializing in the distribution of heating, air conditioning, bathroom, tile, and plumbing supplies, currently has nearly 2,000 employees and more than 104 retail locations across the country. A large part of its operations relies on a proprietary ERP system that has evolved over 49 years—a testament to its robustness but also a major challenge when it came time to modernize it.
When the transformation project was launched, the plan was to gradually replace the existing ERP with a new, fully web-based environment, heavily relying on Docker and Kubernetes. The company ruled out the idea of an abrupt switchover in favor of a phased migration where the legacy ERP would continue to operate while the new system was being built. Two separate teams, one responsible for maintaining the existing system and the other dedicated to developing the new version, ensured that the two systems communicated continuously.
In terms of infrastructure, RICHARDSON operated a traditional architecture: powerful servers, multi-vendor storage, and virtualization technologies to deliver critical services, including the ERP. Like many organizations, the group had to deal with heavy renewal cycles every five to six years, involving a complete overhaul of servers and operating systems, along with rising costs, particularly for VMware by Broadcom. Meanwhile, the IT system was still largely decentralized, with on-prem systems and VMware ROBO instances in some locations.
“We were transitioning from a 49-year-old system to next-generation technologies. We needed a platform that could bridge this gap without driving up complexity or costs,” said Luca Secci, IT Director at RICHARDSON.
The company needed a solution capable of simplifying infrastructure management, integrating Kubernetes without having to hire rare expertise, ensuring high availability for the ERP, and offering a clear path toward consolidation, without getting locked into a single technology.
To address these challenges, RICHARDSON explored several approaches before selecting the Nutanix hyperconverged platform. This choice was driven by technical, economic, and human factors.
Initially, Nutanix was deployed to support the new ERP, while the central infrastructure continued to operate under its previous model. Once the IT teams saw the benefits of the new platform, the decision was made to roll it out across the core infrastructure. A request for proposals was issued for the renewal of the core infrastructure, and Nutanix was selected for technical consistency and operational simplification.
“We love working with local partners—it’s part of our DNA. We identified a regional partner that was knowledgeable about Nutanix, conducted a PoC, and quickly validated the gap between promise and reality,” said Luca Secci, IT Director at RICHARDSON.
The migration of VMware environments to Nutanix was completed over a period of six to seven months, and approximately 350 virtualized servers were gradually transferred to AHV, the Nutanix hypervisor.
Today, RICHARDSON operates twelve Nutanix nodes, distributed between its Marseille headquarters and an external data center, forming two interconnected clusters. This architecture provides a native disaster-recovery plan while remaining fully on-prem. Nutanix snapshots are taken hourly with a retention period of fifteen days, and a daily backup layer, powered by Commvault Systems, Inc., complements the system, also backed by the platform.
On the software layer, the teams utilize all the critical components of the solution: Nutanix Prism for monitoring, Nutanix AHV as the hypervisor, and the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) for Kubernetes. Files Storage is used for data segmentation and management, as well as for snapshot and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities.
“As I see it, if the operations teams have nothing to say about it, that means it’s working. We don’t need anything fancy on the infrastructure side; we want stability and performance. And that’s exactly what we’re getting,” emphasized Secci.
Since going live, the Nutanix platform has become the foundation of RICHARDSON’s IT infrastructure, supporting both the company’s headquarters and its data center. The RICHARDSON team reports high stability, with no major system outages attributable to Nutanix over the past five years.
In addition to reliability, RICHARDSON has seen concrete and measurable benefits. Replacing VMware virtualization with AHV has eliminated significant licensing costs. The integration of Kubernetes via the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform has also eliminated the need to hire a dedicated specialist, representing further substantial savings.
“The product suits us; it’s stable and secure, and if we’re saving money on top of that, it’s perfect,” concluded Secci.
Going forward, the RICHARDSON Group’s priority remains the completion of its digital transformation project and the full migration to the new ERP system. The target architecture is based on a centralized environment powered by the Nutanix platform, with the option to extend to the cloud if business needs require it. Nutanix remains key to this journey, serving as a scalable foundation upon which RICHARDSON can move forward in stages, securing each milestone of the project.
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