System U cuts application deployment costs by 40%
using DROPS on IBMi and Linux
The Customer
System U is the fourth largest retail group in France employing 63,000 staff. It operates five supply centers and 1600 points of sale. In 2011, the U GIE-IRIS entity was formed to manage all aspects of IT for the System U group.
Context
System U rely on several core IBM i applications written in-house in RPG, plus multiple Web and client/server applications written in Java on Linux and ORACLE. The IBM i applications are voluminous and constitute 65% of the deployment workload at the group.
Solution
A shift to a more collaborative “DevOps” organization was necessary for System U, in order to achieve a continuous and end-to-end delivery pipeline across each of their development platforms. That is why they selected DROPS from ARCAD Software : “We preferred DROPS because it was clearly way ahead in terms of support for IBM i which is our core system. Also with DROPS we could standardize on one single tool for deploying all of our technologies, Java, ORACLE, DB2, and RPG. DROPS made deployment simple by masking all the complexity and technical detail, so that operators no longer needed to know which technology was behind” says Vincent Le Guern, Software Architecture Manager at System U.
Case Study Highlights
- Company: System U
- Industry: Retail
- Characteristics: System U needed to accelerate their deployments and reduce operational cost. They also needed to simplify, and get round the issues they were facing due to all the separate tools they used to deploy to different platforms.
- Challenge: Back in 2015, application deployment at System U was perceived as slow and high-risk. Most deployment processes were still manual, representing a significant cost for the group. Vincent Le Guern, Software Architecture Manager at System U, decided to launch a project to radically increase the level of automation in application deployment.
- Solution: DROPS
The power of DROPS is that it is now very easy to pilot and synchronize deliveries across both IBM i and Linux. We can define dependencies between deliveries very easily from the studio GUI. We now have a single interface to track and configure all our deployments, and rollback if necessary