Founded in 1950 and headquartered in Mexico City, Grupo Elektra is a leading financial services and specialty retail corporation that serves over 23 million clients. Grupo Elektra is part of Grupo Salinas and operates in Mexico, the United States and Central America, across more than 7,000 service points and 730 municipalities.
The company’s commercial division includes retail chains such as Elektra and Salinas y Rocha, and its financial services division includes companies such as Banco Azteca, Purpose Financial and Afore Azteca.
At-a-Glance
Grupo Elektra modernized its mission-critical lending platform by replacing a monolithic on-premises environment with a scalable, containerized architecture on SUSE Rancher Prime and AWS. The company also migrated its SAP workloads to AWS using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications. With this transformation, Grupo Elektra achieved 99.98% availability across production lending systems (measured over a 12-month period), significantly reduced unplanned downtime compared to the previous on-premises platform, reduced operating costs by approximately 40% and energy use by 35% compared to the previous on-premises environment, and can now scale services seamlessly for more than 23 million customers.
Overcoming monolithic limitations
To stay ahead of competitors and optimize services for millions of customers across North, Central and South America, Grupo Elektra continuously works to expand its product offerings. In particular, the financial division, which focuses on supporting middle and lower-income families and small businesses through microfinancing, aims to develop innovative digital services to make financial support more accessible.
The Grupo Elektra IT team, working in collaboration with the security and telecommunications teams, enable the development and delivery of digital services while maintaining the IT infrastructure underpinning the company’s day-to-day operations. As a cutting-edge company that aims to deliver value to customers in the shortest possible time, Grupo Elektra’s IT services must be agile, scalable, resilient, secure and cost-effective.
The company’s core lending applications were being maintained on a traditional monolithic on-premises infrastructure, which was becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
“We often had outages and poor application performance, especially during peak seasons such as at Christmas,” begins José Efrain Ramon Pacheco, Cloud Operations Director at Grupo Elektra. “Scaling up was complicated, and the lead time for new products was very long. The outdated infrastructure was putting our business continuity and customer experience at risk.”
With the loan business driving the most profit for the company, Grupo Elektra could no longer accept this risk. The company set out to transform its IT infrastructure to a microservices-based containerized environment with the goal of eliminating unplanned downtime, streamlining and accelerating the development of new products, and reducing operational costs.
“SUSE solutions offered flexibility, performance, a low total cost of ownership and seamless integration with our existing systems. And, the SUSE technology gave us the robust security and ease of achieving regulatory compliance that we need for operating in the financial market.”
Why SUSE solutions?
Grupo Elektra selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications and SUSE Rancher Prime to support the IT transformation project. Key to the decision was the capability of SUSE solutions to be deployed seamlessly both on-premises and in the cloud, as Grupo Elektra looked to shift its SAP workloads to the cloud.
“SUSE solutions offered flexibility, performance, a low total cost of ownership and seamless integration with our existing systems,” explains Efrain. “And, very importantly, SUSE technology gave us the robust security and ease of achieving regulatory compliance that we need for operating in the financial market.”
Working closely with SUSE experts, Grupo Elektra deployed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Rancher Prime on an on-premises infrastructure consisting of nine Lenovo and Dell servers. Grupo Elektra then used SUSE Rancher Prime to create a modern microservices-based containerized architecture for running its lending applications. The company also migrated its SAP workloads onto AWS, and deployed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications in the cloud.
Seeing the value that containerization with SUSE Rancher Prime brought to the lending applications, Grupo Elektra rapidly expanded the transformation project, deploying SUSE Rancher Prime for other services within the financial division, including insurance applications, the business banking portal and the mobile banking application.
In addition, Grupo Elektra chose to deploy SUSE Storage for its Continuous Delivery Platform, which the company uses for seamless deployment from the development and testing environments to the production environment. SUSE Storage provides resilient, high-performance data storage on off-the-shelf hardware, giving the development teams flexibility while protecting the mission-critical data of the Continuous Delivery Platform.
The impact of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Enables 99.98% uptime for business-critical systems
With a microservices infrastructure built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications and SUSE Rancher Prime, Grupo Elektra has essentially eliminated unplanned downtime, achieving service availability of around 99.98%, measured over a 12-month period across production lending systems.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Rancher Prime are stable, high-performance platforms,” confirms Efrain. “SUSE solutions enable Grupo Elektra to build services that inspire confidence in our customers, giving us a competitive advantage in the financial sector.”
The high availability of the new platform has also inspired confidence in the IT team, who are increasingly shifting new deployments to SUSE Rancher Prime.
“Our teams no longer come to me and ask what platform I recommend for a new project,” says Efrain. “They just go ahead and implement it on SUSE Rancher Prime, because they have seen the improvements it has given us. They are very satisfied with the SUSE products.”
Cuts operational costs by 40% and energy consumption by 35%
Using SUSE technologies to consolidate and execute their hybrid cloud strategy, Grupo Elektra has been able to reduce its datacenter footprint from 26 servers to just nine. This has enabled the company to reduce its on-premises datacenter energy consumption by 35%, supporting its sustainability initiatives and contributing to cost savings.
At the same time, the cost-effectiveness of SUSE solutions means that Grupo Elektra has cut operational costs by 40%, giving the company the ability to reinvest more into developing new services for its millions of customers.
“Reducing operational costs was super important to us,” says Efrain. “We are very happy with the savings we have been able to achieve with SUSE, and have no doubt that we will be able to improve our costs further in the future.”
Reinforces security and boosts productivity
With the built-in enhanced security features in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Rancher Prime, Grupo Elektra can stay confidently compliant with the strict regulations of the Mexican National Banking Commission, boosting customer trust.
In parallel, by reducing its datacenter footprint, Grupo Elektra has decreased the time it takes to apply security patching by 85%, helping the company stay proactive in managing security while freeing the IT team to focus on higher-value tasks.
“The advantage of SUSE platforms is that they allow us to centralize and integrate many services together,” explains Efrain. “With 26 servers, it took us around five full days to apply security patches. Now, we only have nine servers. With SUSE, we’ve reduced our security patching window for core infrastructure environments from approximately five days to six hours, a massive 85% reduction in patching time.”
Enables limitless and effortless scalability
Using a microservices-based approach on SUSE Rancher Prime, Grupo Elektra can now easily scale its services to meet demand, especially during peak periods when many customers are accessing services at once. At the same time, when demand is low, the IT team can scale the infrastructure down to keep operations cost-effective. As the company continues to grow, this scalability will help the IT team stay agile and support more innovative services.
“With SUSE Rancher Prime, we can adapt to customer demand automatically,” says Efrain. “It gives us the flexibility to adapt dynamically to varying operational loads, maintaining consistent performance during peak demand.”
What’s next for Grupo Elektra?
As Grupo Elektra continues on the journey to transform its IT infrastructure, it will migrate more of its workloads onto the modern microservices architecture supported by SUSE solutions. At the same time, the company will explore how SUSE can help it embrace automation through infrastructure-as-code and AI, helping to further streamline operations and boost productivity.
“We have made a good start, but we still have a long way to go,” concludes Efrain. “We are working with SUSE to see what other products can help us achieve our medium and long-term objectives, ensuring reliable operations in the financial division of Grupo Elektra and beyond.”