Sheetz Taps Stampede for Application Acceleration Devices
March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie
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Sheetz, a $3.8 billion chain of convenience stores on the East Coast, has deployed Stampede‘s Application Acceleration Series to boost the speed of its WebSphere Portal applications. Founded in 1952, Sheetz operates 329 stores in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina, and employs 11,000. The company–one of the pioneers of the “convenience restaurant” format–is growing fast, having made the Forbes list of top 100 biggest privately held companies the last few years. To support this growth, the company has turned to innovative uses of technology. As such it was one of the first companies to use a touch-screen food ordering system. It also has worked on a deal with MasterCard to implant an RFID chip directly onto a credit card to speed payment. In January, Stampede announced that Sheetz has adopted its hardware-software acceleration devices to make some of their back-office applications run faster. The Application Acceleration Series primarily are used to speed access to WebSphere Portal and other applications from Sheetz stores. Jim Wenner, director of programming for Sheetz, says the Application Acceleration Series work. “The Stampede software improved the performance of our Web-based applications at our retail locations. It was easy to install and deploy,” he says. In addition to speeding access to applications, the Stampede devices systems have enabled Sheetz to delay upgrading their network, an expensive task.
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