Associated Wholesale Grocers Moved Order Intake to Files.com Without Touching 30 Years of Backend Code

Associated Wholesale Grocers is the largest cooperative food wholesaler in the United States. It is owned by the independent grocers it serves: more than 1,100 member companies operating 3,500 stores across 33 states, supplied from nine wholesale divisions. The cooperative exists to give independent supermarkets the scale of a national chain.

Every one of those stores keeps its shelves stocked by ordering from AWG's warehouses, and those orders arrive as files. Member retailers run batch scripts that submit orders to AWG over FTP and pull back confirmations, ads, and discounts. Thousands of independent businesses on ordinary internet connections, all sending files to one wholesaler: that is the fact AWG's file transfer problem grew from.

Grocery Orders in Clear Text on a Server From 2003

The server receiving those orders was a Windows Server 2003 R2 32-bit FTP server that had been in service for decades, sitting in a DMZ with a public network path open to the entire internet.

“It's a 2003 R2 32-bit that's been around for way too long.”

Most of AWG's thousands of retailers sit on dynamic, ISP-assigned IP addresses that change without warning, so whitelisting was impossible. Port 21 stayed open to all source IPs, and orders traveled unencrypted to an operating system long out of support.

Every Fix Priced Out as a Rewrite

Everyone at AWG knew. The problem survived because every path to fixing it was priced as a rewrite, and the diagnosis was simple: the problem was not the server, it was everything bolted to the server.

Decades of automation pointed directly at that machine. COBOL-based processes read from it. The order-receipt processes that pull retailer orders into AWG's internal systems ran against it. Hundreds of customized Cleo Harmony actions, fired by internal schedulers, moved files between it, mainframes, and other servers. AWG estimated that retrofitting those processes to read from any other location would take upwards of 3,000 internal labor hours, while converting the retail backend itself would require more than 1,000 hours. The development team had no capacity for that work, and the business had no appetite to fund it.

The partner side was just as rigid. Thousands of retailers had AWG's connection details baked into their own batch scripts, clients, and retry logic. Any solution that changed how they connect would break the member base one store at a time. AWG had already attempted the obvious modernization once: a move to Azure SFTP over Data Lake storage was backed out after the design ran to 300 pages of documentation.

Two pressures finally made the standstill untenable. The server had to come off the public internet, and AWG needed to onboard retailer and vendor accounts at a pace that one-at-a-time local account creation could not sustain. So the fix had a strict shape before any product entered the picture. It had to take the order server off the internet. It had to leave every downstream job reading files from exactly the place it always had. It had to let a retailer keep their existing script, changing nothing but a connection string and a credential. And it had to provision accounts by the hundreds, not by hand.

AWG selected Files.com to be that transfer edge.

Files.com in Front, the 2003 Server Behind the Agent

The design confined the modernization to the edge: Files.com became the endpoint for migrated retailers, while the 2003 server stayed in place as a backend.

Retailers connected over SFTP to an AWG-branded domain using the same clients and batch scripts they always had, with the same username-and-password-in-a-script pattern. For a retailer, the entire migration was a new hostname and a new credential.

Behind that endpoint, the Files.com Agent ran on Windows Server 2019 machines in AWG's DMZ. The Agent connected outbound to Files.com and reached the legacy server's file root over SMB, presenting its existing folders through Files.com access controls.

Files.com Remote Server Sync carried incoming order files through to the on-premises server within about a minute of arrival. The Cleo Harmony actions and batch jobs behind it picked up files from the same folders they always had, unchanged.

A Lifeblood System, Cut Over in Small Batches

AWG was cutting over a system it could not afford to break, so it moved in verified steps. A cloned copy of the 2003 server runs as a permanent test bed, exercised by a script pushing and pulling files every five minutes, and every new Agent version is validated there before a production window.

A single wholesale division went first. Roughly 100 stores cut over in deliberately small chunks through the holiday change moratorium. The rollout resumed after the holidays, and several hundred stores completed their cutovers while AWG provisioned more than 1,000 external retailer and vendor accounts for the continuing migration.

Encrypted Orders, 1,030 Accounts, and Decades of Code Left in Place

For retailers that completed the cutover, Files.com replaced the clear-text order path with governed SFTP without requiring the rewrites that had kept the old path alive.

• Orders from migrated retailers now arrive encrypted over SFTP on AWG's own domain, and the clear-text FTP path is closed behind them. Each retailer kept their existing script; the cutover asked for a connection string and a credential, nothing more.
• The 3,000-hour process retrofit and the backend conversion never happened. Every Cleo Harmony action, batch job, and COBOL process reads files from the same place it always did.
• AWG provisioned 1,030 retailer and vendor accounts by CSV import instead of creating them one at a time on the server, and onboarding the next retailer is a row in a spreadsheet.
• AWG's security team has an audit trail the old server never produced: roughly 3 million SFTP action entries forwarded to Sumo Logic, recording every transfer.

Modernized at the Edge, Untouched at the Core

Today, an order from an independent grocer leaves the same batch script it always has. It travels encrypted to Files.com, and within about a minute it is sitting in the same folder on the same server where a process written decades ago expects to find it.

AWG proved that a business-critical legacy server does not have to be rewritten before it can be secured. Files.com fronts the estate; the thirty years of order-processing automation behind it stayed exactly where it was, which is the only reason the project was fundable at all.

“We take orders; that's our lifeblood. If we can't take orders and ship orders, then we don't have a business.”