"What we have done is looked at what our business process is, what our customer service ethic looks like, how we could deliver that economically everywhere in the world, and we have designed and developed a system to do that."
Michel Kahn, Group IT Director, Specsavers Optical Group
Specsavers Optical Group is one of the fastest growing retailers in the UK. For the past six years Specsavers has been voted Britain’s most trusted opticians by Reader's Digest - one in three people who wear glasses buys them from Specsavers.
The company is now the largest privately owned opticians in the world with more than 1,000 stores across the UK and Europe and is about to open more than 100 stores in Australia. Annual turnover for 2007 exceeded a record £1billion.
Business Situation
Headquartered in the Channel Islands but with offices around the world, Specsavers pursue a corporate policy of vendor neutrality by deploying a well integrated, heterogeneous infrastructure.
In June 2006, Specsavers asked Sirius to create a centralised model of access control for their Windows workstations and network services in the UK.
The following year this access control model was scaled to allow for the company's rapid global expansion.
The Solution
Initially Sirius engineers deployed Samba and OpenLDAP on Red Hat Linux to authenticate Windows PCs and other network services in Guernsey and mainland UK.
With the global LDAP master running in Guernsey, delegated and replicating LDAP masters were deployed in mainland UK, Finland, Hong Kong and Australia.
This highly resilient, modular architecture allows users within one country domain to access network services in other countries using inter-domain trusts.
The decentralisation of role-based-access-control now allows application or business process owners to create, manage and delegate groups autonomously using GOsa.
The Benefits
Extensible directory services architecture for a large, multi-site enterprise without the licensing overheads of Microsoft Active Directory or SunOne
Escape vendor lock-in
Improved performance and interoperability in a heterogeneous network
Greater workflow efficiency by delegating directory management to business or process owners
