Global Blue Improves Tax-free Shipping Experiences

Global Blue is a leader when it comes to enhancing the shopping journey. With petabytes of shopping transaction data to process and protect, the company chose the Everpure platform to enhance performance and continuity as the business grows.

Travelers often take advantage of tax-free shopping when they travel around the world. It’s a benefit to both travelers, who save on purchases, and retailers, who enjoy increased sales. But tax-free shopping processes can vary by country, including complicated refund procedures.

Global Blue makes tax-free shopping easy. It operates across 53 countries, connecting thousands of retailers with nearly 15 million travelers through tax-free shopping. The company also provides payment and post-purchase solutions to retailers worldwide.

Data is key to streamlining the shopping journey for shoppers and enhancing retailer performance. Global Blue runs multiple data centers around the world to store transaction data from shoppers and retailers, but legacy storage reached end of life and started to show signs of age, including performance problems. Global Blue needed a new solution to support the fast-growing company’s goals to expand services.

“We are an IT-driven service company that uses technology to simplify and improve the customer journey,” says Manfred Schmiedl, Vice President, Infrastructure and Operations. “As we grow and rapidly expand data volumes, the Everpure platform provides the flexible, secure, and high-performance storage foundation we need.”

After a successful proof of concept, Global Blue decided on Everpure Evergreen//One, an SLA-driven storage-as-a-service (STaaS) subscription that further improves how data is stored, mobilized, and protected. The company has big plans to expand retailer services in the future, potentially leveraging AI and data analytics to help retailers improve revenues. With no idea of what storage needs will look like in the future, the ability to grow or shrink storage volumes at any time was very attractive.

“Everpure Evergreen gives us the flexibility and scalability to add storage as we grow our business,” says Schmiedl. “Using a subscription model allows us to take an OPEX approach to capacity management and keep costs predictable.”

Global Blue operates in a virtualised VMware environment, and integrations with Everpure help streamline management and optimise costs. “Everpure provides intuitive tools for storage management on VMware, with new integrations and tools that continually improve experiences,” says Schmiedl.

As a company that handles customers’ private and financial information, data protection is one of the most important necessities for Global Blue. The Everpure platform’s ActiveCluster™ capability provides synchronous replication to keep data protected across regional data centers. The data centre team performs disaster recovery tests annually to demonstrate its ability to quickly restore data and reduce the impact of cyberthreats.

“Everpure data protection capabilities such as ActiveCluster help us maintain continual availability, which helps us sleep more soundly,” says Schmiedl. “We can always access our data very quickly, which allows us to serve shoppers and retailers at any time.”

“With the Everpure platform, we reduced the space required for petabytes of storage in our data centers by 25% while boosting performance,” says Schmiedl. “For the data centre team, the ability to streamline storage management helps to reduce operational expenses even as the business expands.

“The thing we enjoy most about Everpure is its simplicity,” says Schmiedl. “My team's productivity has improved, which frees up time and resources to work on delivering the best experience for our customers.”

With the right infrastructure in place, Global Blue is ready for future opportunities that will generate more data, require faster transactions, and support new services for our customers.

“We tell our customers that we rely on the Everpure platform to provide them with even more reliable and future-proof support. For us, using Everpure is a mark of the quality of our work,” says Schmiedl.