Hungry Jack’s lays the foundation for transforming customer engagement on Azure
This iconic Australian hamburger chain upleveled its omni-channel strategy with customer focused services underpinned by an enterprise-grade landing zone.
Industry
Food and Beverage
Challenge
To innovate in customer engagement, Hungry Jack’s set out to build a more modern digital infrastructure. Evolving customer expectations demanded greater agility, visibility and security.
Outcome Hungry Jack’s mobile services will now be built on top of an enterprise-grade Azure landing zone, providing a security-compliant, robust and automated platform. Solutions Rackspace Elastic Engineering Platforms Microsoft AzureCustomer
Hungry Jack’s (Hungry Jack's Pty Ltd.) is an Australian fast-food franchise within the Burger King Corporation. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Competitive Foods Australia, a privately held company owned by Jack Cowin. Hungry Jack's owns and operates or sub-licenses all Burger King/Hungry Jack's restaurants in Australia. It's known for using 100% Australian beef on its burgers.
Founded in 1971 with one restaurant in Perth, today this proudly Aussie-owned company operates over 440 restaurants serving every major population center in the country. It employs over 19,000 Aussies, serving up over 125 million Australian beef patties every year.
“Rackspace has been proactive from day one, constantly pushing us to improve — not just waiting for us to ask.”
Situation
Customer engagement drives the success of restaurant chains. Delivering digital programs such as ordering apps, loyalty programs and gamification promotions requires advanced technologies and a modern operating model. If today’s digitally driven consumers cannot efficiently and dependably order food and get rewards, they will move on to other businesses that do. This reality makes the infrastructure on which customer apps live more important than ever.
Hungry Jack’s first-generation app was designed to develop a user-centric digital ecosystem aimed at increasing average order value and driving customer loyalty. As soon as Hungry Jack’s launched its app, it grew rapidly and exponentially. But the growth quickly hit a technology wall, lacking the speed and scale necessary to adapt to market changes and customers’ increasing demands. This impeded the company’s ability to attract new customers and expand engagement.
Compounding the problem was a backend architecture that lacked flexibility, scalability and modern design. This led to higher infrastructure costs and slower delivery cycles.
When it became clear the existing infrastructure could not align with evolving business and technical requirements, the fast-food giant embarked on a program to modernize its architecture and underlying infrastructure.
As a long-term customer of Rackspace Technology for a variety of technology initiatives, Hungry Jack’s met with a Rackspace Elastic Engineering team to discuss its complex business and infrastructure needs. After a rigorous vetting process, the fast-food giant chose Rackspace based on its technical expertise, cost optimization capabilities and deep knowledge of the restaurant chain’s business operations.
“We now have the ability to spin up environments as needed — fast, repeatable and reliable. That’s a game-changer for us.”
Solution
Hungry Jack's set out to modernize its digital infrastructure and bring greater control and capabilities in-house. Operating in a legacy environment built by external vendors, the team turned to Rackspace for a strategic migration to Microsoft® Azure®. The Rackspace Elastic Engineering team provided the technical expertise and guidance required to help Hungry Jack's create a secure, scalable and cost-optimized digital platform.
The Rackspace team mobilized quickly to address Hungry Jack’s three top strategic objectives:
- Support customer engagement by providing the infrastructure tools necessary to increase feature releases.
- Provide the ability to scale quickly and deliver performance visibility.
- Streamline operations and improve supportability.
To achieve these goals, Rackspace built a functional, bespoke CI/CD Azure landing zone using infrastructure as code (IaC). It provided Hungry Jack’s with the agility, visibility and governance it needed to optimize customer engagement. Through the new system, Rackspace engineers provided on-demand deployments, increased the quality of each release with quality assurance and provided tools to assist in platform performance and engagement.
Beyond the core objectives, the Rackspace team executed additional initiatives that advanced security, scalability and operational maturity:
- Sharing strategic technical advice: The team went beyond a vendor role to offer recommendations and guidance on Hungry Jack’s future state digital backend environment.
- Adding security and cost optimization: Built security architecture and cost controls with use-based Azure services.
- Automating processes: Deployed pipelines that were fully automated, eliminating human error and accelerating release cycles.
- Optimizing performance: Helped validate and improve performance across multicloud platforms.
- Taking a collaborative approach: Collaborated with Microsoft and Rackspace to help ensure aligned outcomes.
- Transferring knowledge: Worked closely with Hungry Jack’s growing internal and offshore teams to transfer skills and operational knowledge.
A customized plan for the two-week handover period resulted in zero downtime.
Outcome
In its new Azure environment, Hungry Jack’s is aiming to advance its omnichannel strategy and strengthen customer engagement with tools and processes that accelerate new feature delivery. With a secure, compliant Azure landing zone built on infrastructure as code, Hungry Jack’s is positioned to rapidly expand its customer engagement program. The next phase will involve the Rackspace team helping Hungry Jack’s migrate existing services and execute new builds.
In addition to accelerating speed-to-market, the CI/CD framework incorporated DevSecOps best practices, such as continuous security checks embedded in the pipeline and automated patching. As a result, every application update now includes a security update, improving efficiency and reinforcing application resilience.
The engagement produced additional benefits for Hungry Jack’s:
- Fast time-to-market: Automated infrastructure deployments significantly reduce release times.
- Low costs: Azure’s pay-as-you-go model has resulted in more efficient resource use.
- Knowledge uplift: Rackspace helped enable in-house teams to manage and evolve the platform independently.
- Future-proof architecture: The new platform supports innovation such as internal tools and new customer-facing applications.
- Disaster recovery readiness: Plans are in place for geo-redundant recovery, made possible through infrastructure as code.
- Improve platform stability: Helps support significantly reduced issues and increased uptime across applications.
“The outcome we have seen is exactly where we wanted to be when we embarked on this journey,” said Arif Khan, Digital & Architecture Director for Hungry Jack’s. “Rackspace has been phenomenal. They’re a true partner. It’s not just a vendor relationship — it’s collaboration, and that’s rare.”
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end hybrid cloud and AI solutions company. We can design, build, and operate our customers' cloud environments across all major technology platforms, irrespective of technology stack or deployment model. We partner with our customers at every stage of their cloud journey, enabling them to modernize applications, build new products, and adopt innovative technologies.
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