Global Marketing & Retail Analytics Company
Industry: Marketing & Advertising
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Staying competitive in the retail analytics and loyalty market comes at a high price. Faced with the need to deliver applications and customer solutions faster, marketing companies are tasked with managing multiple tools and operating environments – all tied to escalating support and licensing costs. With CDW’s assistance, a global loyalty marketing company embarked on a plan to address this complexity and reduce costs associated with maintaining their development and testing environments.
Going into the project, the goal was to streamline the company’s operating system (OS) environment and supported platforms into an open source framework. The company was already using Red Hat products in its middleware application layer and on some operating systems. “We worked with them to develop a business case to ascertain if it made financial sense to simplify their environment by making a larger stake in the Red Hat product line,” said the CDW Account Manager.
After agreeing that the Red Hat platform could help reduce the overall spend and simplify license management, the team reviewed the technical capabilities and made the decision to go forward with a proof of concept.
Red Hat offers flexibility without added costs
A Red Hat licensing package was purchased to ensure all systems remained under subscription and under support. They also have the flexibility with the licensed technologies to change deployment models without having to go back to the vendor and spend more money.
“It is very easy to set up and deploy, but it is important to customize the tool to ensure it is tailored to the client’s business process.”
Objective
Achieve a reduction in costs and simplified licensing by streamlining the company’s operating system (OS) environment and supported platforms into an open source framework.
“They just required the right platform at the right price – Red Hat has provided this.”
The subscription includes:
Private Cloud Infrastructure: The core subscription (Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure) provides heterogeneous coverage and includes the ability for the company to deploy its VMware Hypervisor virtualization environment. This solution also provides automated provisioning, configuration management and software management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Self-Service Portal: Typically, standing up an environment for developers can take a lot of time and resources. This complexity is eliminated via a self-service portal (Red Hat CloudForms) that ensures developers get up and running quickly without burdening the IT team. The portal workflows required customization – “It is very easy to set up and deploy, but it is important to customize the tool to ensure it is tailored to the client’s business process,” said the Account Manager. CDW worked with the client to understand how its team works and to put compliance and governance policies in place. In all, the Cloud Infrastructure licence has provided access to a suite of Red Hat products, including:
CloudForms Satellite Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
“The reality is that only about one third of our client’s environment is production grade, warranting the higher spend, and bells and whistles functionality. For the remaining two thirds, which are used for development and testing, they just required the right platform at the right price – Red Hat has provided this,” said Stewart.
Highlights
• Reduction in OS licensing reduced the load on servers
• Flexibility to change deployment models without incurring additional costs
• CloudForms provisioning engine provides developer self-service portal
Technology Used
• Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure
• Red Hat CloudForms
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
• Red Hat Satellite
