How PAC 2000A Conad Built the Always-On Infrastructure Behind €8 Billion with EDB Postgres® AI

PAC 2000A Conad is the largest cooperative in the Conad Consortium and the leader in large-scale retail across Central and Southern Italy. With more than 1,600 stores spanning five regions and a total network turnover exceeding €8 billion, it is an organization built on shared ownership and territorial responsibility, one whose obligation to the communities it serves runs deeper than commerce.

As order volumes grew and the complexity of continuous operations scaled with them, the infrastructure supporting the network had to be fundamentally rethought. Luca Cibruscola, CIO of PAC 2000A Conad, shares how his team worked alongside EDB and Uno Informatica to build an always-on, sovereign data foundation, and why the most significant outcome was as much about people as technology.

Running the largest cooperative in the Conad Consortium means managing a supply chain that never sleeps. From logistics centers distributing goods across five regions to more than 1,600 points of sale serving customers every day, PAC 2000A Conad operates a network where continuous service is a baseline obligation.

For years, that network had been growing—adding stores, expanding the assortment, bringing new concept formats to market. Daily orders surpassed 20,000 and annual invoiced lines approached 300 million. As volumes grew faster than the architecture beneath them, the foundation supporting PAC 2000A's operations had to be fundamentally rethought.

How EDB and Uno Informatica built a 24/7 data foundation for PAC 2000A

The rethinking began with a thorough evaluation of what the market offered, including the evolution of what PAC 2000A already had in production. The requirement that emerged was a distributed architecture capable of supporting continuous operations across the entire network, with no tolerance for downtime. EDB PG AI provided that foundation, and EDB became the central technology partner in everything that followed.

What distinguished the outcome, according to Cibruscola, was about as much about the strategy as it was the actual technology. Defining the architecture, validating the configuration, and managing the most critical phases of the migration required a unified team: EDB working alongside PAC 2000A's information systems team and Uno Informatica, the Arezzo-based IT specialist that orchestrated the project from implementation through delivery.

For Uno Informatica, that kind of sustained engagement reflects a deliberate philosophy. Paolo Sarchini, IT Solutions Architect at Uno Informatica, draws a clear distinction between suppliers and partners: “Suppliers resolve a single problem and move on; partners make the journey.” 

NIS2 compliance, scalable infrastructure, and 7,000 devices running simultaneously

The new distributed architecture delivered scalability and flexibility at a scale previously out of reach, enabling more than 7,000 smartphones to operate simultaneously across the network. Alongside it came NIS2-aligned backup and recovery policies, application-consistent and cyber-resilient, with RTO and RPO requirements built around the demands of large-scale retail operations.

The rewrite of core application components extended the impact further, enabling PAC 2000A to deliver new services to its members while maintaining full continuity during maintenance windows and data center events. Workloads could now be distributed across multiple operational sites without disruption, turning what had been a resilience gap into a genuine operational advantage.

What comes next: sovereign AI agents and expanding architecture

The foundation PAC 2000A has built is already being put to work. The cooperative is actively piloting AI-driven capabilities in its operations, using document capture to accelerate goods receiving at the point of unloading and camera-based image processing to handle large volumes in compressed timeframes. Both are early proof points for the broader AI integration Cibruscola sees as essential to staying competitive.

In the coming months, PAC 2000A will consolidate the current architecture before introducing AI agents operating in sovereign mode, a design choice rooted in a firm conviction that artificial intelligence must remain under the cooperative's direct control. Extending the distributed architecture to additional application areas and strengthening disaster recovery mechanisms are the immediate priorities.

Cibruscola approaches the road ahead with the same philosophy that guided the transformation: infrastructure modernization is a strategic investment, one that shapes growth, resilience, and operational capacity long after the initial deployment. “Invest in people before technology,” he advises. “Sic parvis magna. Greatness from small beginnings.”