NCR Corporation announced that Pilot Flying J, the largest operator of travel centers in North America, is deploying its transformational store architecture solution, NCR Software Defined Store enabled by Zynstra. This unique virtualization solution is a part of NCR’s blueprint for the next generation retail store architecture. The architecture is purpose built for retailers and creates an agile infrastructure across the entire store reducing costs and optimizing operations for faster innovation.

“One of the biggest challenges retailers face today is dealing with legacy IT infrastructures that simply can’t keep up with the pace of the business,” said David Wilkinson, senior vice president and general manager Retail at NCR. “With NCR Software Defined Store, we help our retailers move to the cloud and add new applications and services quickly, so that they can increase the speed-to-market while lowering their overall total costs of ownership.”

By virtualizing back and front office store technology with intelligent automation, retailers significantly reduce the number of servers and hardware to maintain. This simplifies maintenance and enables systems to operate on multiple devices.

“Store IT infrastructures today are complex and expensive to maintain,” said Mike Rodgers, chief strategy and information officer at Pilot Flying J. “By shifting our store infrastructure from a hardware centric to a software focused approach, we will be able to increase our speed-of-service, quickly deploy upgrades across our network of stores and add new features and innovations including cloud-enabled services across our chain.”

NCR has been working with Zynstra, a leading software provider focused at the retail edge, to bring proven virtualization technology with centralized management to the retail industry.

Retailers now have the ability to optimize their store technology costs while accelerating the digital transformation path for their stores.