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Corporate Express sees online success with Red Hat

Background

Corporate Express offers highly specialised expertise and tailored advice to streamline procurement needs for around 110,000 active business customers. It caters for every aspect of a business with IT solutions, print services, promotional marketing, business furniture, facilities supplies, catering and kitchen supplies and office essentials.

Along with its 48 locations across Australia and New Zealand, Corporate Express operates an online ordering system. This accounts for a large proportion of overall business, with in excess of 400,000 page views a day through online servers and 1.7 million hits a day from people purchasing.

For the financial year ended 30 December 2006, Corporate Express reported revenues of $1.2 billion, of which it attributed 71 per cent to sales through its online ordering system.

Challenge

To deliver an efficient service to customers, Corporate Express required an infrastructure solution that was stable and secure, yet also flexible enough to support its bespoke online ordering application, NetXpress. According to Travers Nicholas, Infrastructure Services Manager at Corporate Express, “Our online presence is a critical part of the business - in the last financial year, it was responsible for over 70 per cent of revenue. It also supports our B2B portal, a direct link up for our large enterprise customers.

“The business absolutely relies on having a highly stable and secure system, to ensure that we’re available and able to accept orders whenever our customers need to place them,” he says. As a business with a fast growing user base, Corporate Express also needed to ensure it had a horizontally scalable environment.

Solution

Since 2002, Corporate Express has used Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Apache, as the basis of its online presence.

Today, Corporate Express is one of Red Hat’s biggest users in Australia, running 69 different Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers across the board, including over a dozen Intel blade servers dedicated to driving its core NetXpress online ordering system.

“Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform is a fundamental component of our infrastructure,” states Mr Nicholas. In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Corporate Express runs Red Hat Network Satellite to enable timely patching and server provisioning, to further reduce TCO and administration costs and to provide ease of management benefits.

Benefits

Red Hat not only delivered the reliability the Corporate Express business required, it is also helping the business scale out to accommodate its growth.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to achieve the level of rock solid stability our business demands. Our Red Hat systems simply don’t crash,” says Mr Nicholas.

“Compared with other environments, Red Hat Network Satellite has also made it easier to manage systems, which we anticipate will result in lower administration costs.

“This, combined with the fact that we have reduced our operational risks, leads me to believe that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has more than paid for itself.”

As the business continues to grow at an impressive rate, Mr Nicholas is confident Red Hat will continue to support its market success.

“There is no doubt that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the enterprise Linux of choice and as we face further growth, it will help us to facilitate new expansion,” concludes Mr Nicholas.