The European eyecare specialist has moved to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its European servers, desktops, and point-of-sale systems as part of a complete IT infrastructure refresh across its 830 stores.

It has migrated its in-house developed Socrates 7 Java-based store application from Windows 2000 to Red Hat and is replacing all the desktops and servers in its stores in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Spain with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"With our new store system, every single business-critical application is running on Red Hat, from the till to the test room hardware. We were convinced that Linux would have a major positive impact on our business and Red Hat has delivered exactly what it promised," commented Nigel Spain, Specsavers's global architecture manager.

The company already has a history of using open source software, including Apache and the JBoss jBPM process management engine, as well as an open source ERP system for its wholesale business in Australia and Hong Kong.

It has also deployed the Scalix for email and calendaring thanks to an alliance between Scalix and UK-based open source services specialist Sirius, which helped the company move to an OpenLDAP directory in place of Microsoft Exchange.

Additionally, a number of back-office servers have moved from Solaris to Red Hat, while Specsavers is also making use of Red Hat Network Satellite Server, an on-premise systems-management offering, to centrally manage all of its Red Hat installations.

"The Satellite Server is strategically essential for our operations; we can now automate our whole deployment and manage maintenance and updates centrally. This used to be completed manually going to every single store one-by-one and delaying the process extensively," said Spain.

© 2007 Matthew Aslett, Computer Business Review. Original article

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