Consumer Retail Company

Consumer Retail Company

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Company: Consumer Retail
Employees: 25,000
Annual Revenue: $3.5 billion
Location: United States

Their Technology

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Virtualization: VMware vCenter, OpenStack, HP Virtual Connect
Configuration Management: Puppet
Continuous Integration: Jenkins
Orchestration: Rundeck
Ticketing: ServiceNow
IPAM: InfoBlox
Operating Systems: CentOS, Windows, Ubuntu
VMs: 1,800+

CloudBolt’s Competition

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• VMware vCloud Automation Center
• Cloud360
• Red Hat CloudForms
  
• HP CloudSystem Matrix

Their Challenge

At this company, the IT group primarily services the e-commerce group, which is responsible for the web storefronts of all the corporate brands, and for a significant portion of the company’s revenue. To speed delivery of new and innovative capabilities, the e-commerce team needed a platform that would allow on-demand access to production and development/test resources, with high compliance to PCI and other standards. Initially, they experimented with a homegrown solution based on OpenStack, but this was rejected by the CIO because it failed to effectively take into account needs of other lines of business. The potential for infrastructure fragmentation, extra costs, and large amounts of duplicated work caused this company to search for a better solution.

CloudBolt’s Solution

Summary

• Aligned IT and e-commerce teams
• Unifies management and access through UI and API
• Enables IT to offer customize offerings to different lines of business
• Deployed services meet strict standards and configuration requirements
• IT regains the ability to make effective technology decisions

Aligned IT with lines of business
CloudBolt enabled the IT team to offer distinct solutions to various lines of business without adding significant OpEx. Increased service to the lines of business ensures the IT team is a partner to success rather than merely a service provider, and ultimately results in more productivity and innovation from all parties.

Expanded configuration management
CloudBolt’s integration with Puppet configuration management made it simple to pair VMware virtualization with Puppet configuration management. Even non-technical users can now use the Puppet resources and applications IT developed because they’re exposed as installable and manageable applications on requested servers. The company now spends less time managing dozens of VM templates, and more time realizing the added value of effective configuration management.

Provided IT flexibility in technology choice
The customer has a fairly large amount of legacy infrastructure in the form of existing VMs, deployed applications, and other stand-alone physical server environments. CloudBolt has become the foundation for a transformative IT process that will enable IT to begin deploying services that can help them retire legacy infrastructure that carries along significant OpEx requirements. CloudBolt also enabled the IT team to reduce their dependence on single-vendor virtualization solutions, saving money, and reducing risk to the business.

Obsoleted their expensive HP CloudSystem Matrix deployment
Even after significant investments in professional services and painful upgrade experiences, HP CloudSystem Matrix was not able to meet this company’s requirement of a user-ready portal. When the company started investigating CloudBolt, they were excited by the contrasts: painless upgrades and a feature-set thoughtfully designed to meet their needs.

More accurate test environments
When working to test new software releases, the e-commerce team had to rely on environments that were not exact replicas of production systems. By using the CloudBolt API, the
e-commerce team enabled their continuous integration environment to use production-replica systems to perform build and functionality tests, which increased productivity, as well as code quality.

Customer Findings

Summary

✦ Rapid time to value — up and running in less than a day
✦ Easy installations, customizations, and upgrades means CloudBolt grows with them
✦ High-value product roadmap will allow further innovation
✦ Immediate delivery of test environments reduced time to deployment by 50%
✦ Compelling price point with low barrier to entry

CloudBolt’s ease of use was one of the customer’s favorite features. A key reviewer of CloudBolt mentioned that they felt more confident with users ordering servers from CloudBolt than with any other system. After struggling to use CloudForms and Cloud360, the reviewer felt that they were not viable portals for end-users and that both required too much expensive customization to meet requirements.

The well rounded feature-set that CloudBolt provided helped them re-unify their infrastructure and allowed them to avoid investing more into their failed HP CloudSystem Matrix deployment by dropping it entirely. This company now has a self-service portal that allows IT to be successful in providing their consumers simple access to needed resources.