Office Depot modernizes, saving over 40 percent in IT management costs with SUSE

“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server rarely has performance or bug issues that impact production. This is the operating system powering most of our retail footprint.” George Woods, Director of IT for Application Infrastructure at Office Depot.

Office Depot’s IT department was tasked with modernizing systems to support company growth.

It was agreed that adopting a cloud-first strategy would support rapid innovation and response to market changes, generate better customer experiences, help manage security and minimize costs.

When planning how to better manage their mixed IT environment and securely migrate operations to private cloud, Office Depot evaluated several vendors. SUSE was selected based on its long history in the retail industry, commitment to open source and proven reliability. It was determined that SUSE solutions would help Office Depot reach their goals swiftly and cost-effectively.

Office Depot selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as its primary operating system on private cloud and in their on-premise central data centers. SUSE Manager was deployed to schedule and push releases out to Office Depot’s 1,200+ store environments. SUSE Manager for Retail was adopted to automate updates for the in-store servers, running over 5,000 point-of-sales registers.

SUSE now supports 85 percent of Office Depot’s Unix/Linux workloads, meaning that a large portion of its revenue-generating assets are entrusted to SUSE solutions.

Shaping an efficient future for Office Depot

By centralizing mixed-platform management into SUSE Manager, SUSE Manager for Retail and SUSE Linux Enterprise Expanded Support, Office Depot has saved over 40 percent in management costs. They have also been able to confidently move forward with their cloud-first strategy as SLES provides the requisite stability and reliability in a hybrid-cloud scenario, alongside their legacy hardware.

Not only is the SUSE solution reliable, it also supports efficient operations, helping to keep expenses down with only a relatively lean engineering team necessary to support 1,200+ servers and over 5,000 register end points.

As a result of efficiencies achieved through SUSE’s technology and support, the Office Depot IT team has benefited from a reduction of retail store overhead expenses.

Resources can now be focused on customer needs instead of putting time, effort, and energy into managing the operating system assets and infrastructure.

Staff time is allocated to more innovative development and value-added engineering activities, rather than just day-to-day operations.

Click here to discover how by reducing costs by over 40 percent, simplifying the management of their systems, and building a cloud infrastructure ripe for innovation, Office Depot is primed for success.