World's leading optician selects Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware to streamline
costs & business efficiencies
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced that Specsavers, the world's largest
privately owned chain of opticians, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite, and Red Hat
JBoss Fuse to provide a reliable and stable platform for
mission-critical applications across its range of more than 1,500 stores
globally, its supply chain and datacentres in Guernsey, Denmark, and
Australia.
Specsavers is an enthusiastic proponent of open source software and has
been a Red Hat customer for more than ten years. Over time, the company
has migrated its IT infrastructure from Sun Solaris to a standardised
Red Hat environment, with servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux
supporting every store, the entire supply chain and several datacentres,
constituting about 80 percent of the organization's global technology
estate. Specsavers chose to standardise on Red Hat globally as a
cost-effective technology that gives the consistency, stability, and
reliability required in a retail environment. For Specsavers, the low
operational costs it has experienced with Red Hat open source software
are essential for the health of the business as it expands, enabling it
to open new stores and refresh existing stores according to budget
requirements whilst delivering on quality of customer service.
Red Hat JBoss Fuse powers the connectivity between the supply chain, the
stores, and the head office data centre, giving Specsavers a robust,
easy-to-use platform to integrate its applications, data, services and
devices. The business is run on a joint venture partnership basis, with
each store an independent business running store services and collecting
customer data and order information. To enable innovation and drive core
strategy, the business must remain agile, and crucial to this is the
ability to easily change key underlying applications, services and
processes used to make decisions, as well as process customer data
effectively. Red Hat JBoss Fuse meets this need for Specsavers.
To support continued business growth, Specsavers has renewed and
expanded its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization estate across its
business-critical data centres across the globe. It has increased the
virtual footprint from 60 to 130 sockets following the purchase of a new
Fujitsu blade server and can now run hundreds of virtual machines per
blade server, benefiting from increased compute power at reduced cost.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers Specsavers the management
functionality it needs and delivers excellent total cost of ownership
(TCO) value, with lower maintenance costs and a lower upfront cost of
deployment. Further positive advantages realised in Specsavers'
application testing process as a result of Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualization include faster resource allocation and the ability to
replicate various environments without needing access to physical
systems, which could typically consume large amounts of space.
Specsavers is able to achieve faster creation of test and build
environments, eliminating long lead times and cost associated to bring
in physical resources, and enable old physical servers to be re-purposed.
Supporting Quotes:
Nigel Spain, Head of Technology & Innovation, Specsavers:
"We are a global business and need our technology infrastructure to
support the heavy-lifting demands of an extensive retail environment.
Red Hat enables us to deliver on our core values to customers by giving
us the consistent, flexible, affordable platform we need to continue
offering value for money and a personal service. One of the key
principles of our IT strategy is to ensure we can keep innovating - if
we are seeking new applications or platforms we need interoperability
and open integration with other technology solutions. This is a key
reason why we have deployed Red Hat extensively throughout the business."
Phil Andrews, regional VP of Northern and Eastern Europe, Red Hat
"We're pleased to be expanding our long-term relationship with
Specsavers as its chosen open source partner to underpin its
infrastructure across the board. Specsavers relies on Red Hat to deliver
mission critical services and applications in its 1,500 stores, supply
chain and data centres, while cutting costs as it embraces
virtualization technology and drives efficiencies in the data centre."
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About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software
solutions, taking a community-powered approach to reliable and
high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization
technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and
consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of
enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create
relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and
prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.
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Red Hat, Inc.
Daniel Thompson, 978-589-1059
dthompso@redhat.com
Source: Red Hat, Inc.
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