Specsavers focuses on Red Hat

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 organisation’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.