CASE STUDYCASE STUDY

Petco stays ahead of the pack amidst fierce competition in
the $90B pet care market

Petco, a leading pet specialty retailer with more than 50years of service to pet parents, approaches every decision
guided by their vision for healthier pets, happier people, and abetter world. As pet parents’ trusted partner in caring for thehealth and wellness of their pets, Petco provides them withthe products, pet care services, advice, and experiences tohelp ensure their overall well-being. With more than 27,000
employees and 1,500 locations across the U.S., Mexico, andPuerto Rico, the company maintains a robust online presence,delivering pet care products and veterinary advice throughpetco.com petcoach.co.

“Everything we do is focused on creating
better experiences for pet parents.
When customers visit our stores oronline businesses, we earn their loyalty
by anticipating their needs and creating amore fulfilling experience.”

Hanuman Yalamanchi
Manager, Care
Infrastructure Services
Petco

WINNING IN A FIERCELY COMPETITIVE MARKETPLACE
The retail industry, and especially the pet care segment, faces numerous technology challenges today, including engaging
customers across many different channels, maintaining customer loyalty, translating data analytics into better customer
experiences, and achieving process and cost efficiencies. Amidst fierce competition from direct competitors, mega-chain
stores, and e-commerce giants, Petco has maintained its leadership position in the $90+ billion pet care marketplace byclosely monitoring, understanding, and catering to the needs of its customers.
TECHNOLOGY ENABLES BETTER PET PARENT EXPERIENCES
Hanuman Yalamanchi, manager of Petco’s core IT infrastructureservices, oversees the company’s data centers, including its retailmerchandising, ERP, supply chain, predictive analytics, backup, andrecovery systems. “Everything we do is focused on creating better
experiences for pet parents,” Hanuman said. “When customers visit
our stores or online businesses, we earn their loyalty by anticipating
their needs and creating a more fulfilling experience.” Among Petco’s
industry differentiators are removing pet food with artificial ingredientsfrom its shelves, providing high-quality and affordable veterinary
care at veterinary clinics, full-service hospitals located in their Petcolocations, and offering fresh, nutritionally balanced and 100% humangrade meals for dogs.

RETHINKING PETCO’S IT INFRASTRUCTURE STRATEGY
An important part of Petco’s strategy for creating market-leading customer
experiences has been to improve the speed, performance, reliability, and costefficiency of its IT infrastructure. According to Hanuman, who began his career at Petco
two decades ago, “There once was a time when data storage in retail was viewed as acost center. That’s no longer the case. Significant increases in data consumption, submillisecond application performance requirements, resiliency, and the need to do morewith less have changed everything. Today, we are a strategic partner for our internalbusiness teams, and a critical enabler of competitive advantage for the company.”
THE PETCO­‑INFINIDAT PARTNERSHIP
When Petco’s IT team set out to upgrade its infrastructure four years ago, they wereseeking an innovative partner with a creative approach to meeting the company’s
current and future needs. At the time, according to Hanuman, many conventional
storage vendors were resting on their laurels and were less than responsive to theircustomers’ unique needs. Infinidat offered a fundamentally new approach to storage
technology and support. “Upgrading every three years is not economically feasible
for our business. Infinidat exceeded our top criteria, which included scalability, ease ofimplementation and management, and high availability/reliability at a lower TCO.”
Today, most of Petco’s core business systems run on four InfiniBox® enterprise storagearrays in multiple data centers. Hanuman reports that Infinidat has been an excellent
business partner. “We have experienced no downtime in three years as a result of theredundancies Infinidat builds into its systems, and their support has been extremelyproactive. Recently, we had a performance issue on an application. They immediately
identified that the I/O was under two milliseconds and helped us diagnose the root
cause that same day. We rely on predictive analytics from the InfiniMetrics platform toidentify potential performance bottlenecks in our storage network infrastructure, findand reclaim capacity from dormant volumes, and simplify resource planning And they dothis at far lower cost than other systems.”
To learn more about how Infinidat can help your organization scale to win,
visit Infinidat.com.

info@infinidat.com | +1.855.900.4634
CS-PETCO-200608-US | © Infinidat 2023

An important element ofPetco’s strategy for designingmarket-leading customer
experiences is improving thespeed, performance, reliability,and cost-efficiency of its IT
infrastructure. The company
has achieved these objectives,
while experiencing nodowntime, over the course ofits partnership with Infinidat.