Red Hat Summit
DAB Pumps creates water technology solutions to optimize energy consumption in residential, commercial, agricultural, and irrigation applications. To achieve its ambitious growth target and enhance its user experience, DAB sought to improve integration between its many isolated IT systems. The manufacturer used Red Hat integration and runtimes solutions, supported by Red Hat’s single sign-on (SSO) technology, to create a reliable, scalable foundation for a new services-based business model and future cloud adoption. As a result, DAB reduced time to market by 60%, streamlined its online user login experience, and improved partner integration.
Benefits
- Streamlined online user experience with fewer logins and faster communication
- Reduced service time to market by 60%
- Simplified integration with third-party partners
- Created stable, scalable foundation for future cloud adoption
Uniting isolated IT systems to improve salesperson and customer experience
DAB Pumps has helped customers move and manage water for more than 40 years. Producing more than 2.5 million pieces of equipment each year, including water pumps and other water management-related accessories , DAB offers water technological solutions to optimize resource consumption for residential, commercial, agricultural, and irrigation needs.
The manufacturer works to continuously identify ways to simplify installation, use, and maintenance of its products. DAB aimed to improve its experience for both customers and salespeople with streamlined online services. However, the manufacturer’s existing IT systems lacked the responsiveness to keep up with digital service demand.
“Our existing IT systems were not able to provide timely information on pump prices and stock availability,” said Stefano Dalla Grana, Head of IT, DAB Pumps. “Additionally, each system had its own sign-on credentials, so users had to log in to each one and remember multiple passwords to get the information they needed.”
DAB also planned to double its business size within five years. To successfully support this growth with a 14-person IT department, it needed an IT approach that balanced the team’s skills and experience with change at the necessary pace.
To support this growth while improving its user experience, DAB sought to unite its many, isolated systems and simplify integration with third-party suppliers.
Connecting enterprise systems with Red Hat integration and platform technology
DAB quickly decided to work with Red Hat to create its new infrastructure with a supported enterprise solution.
“Red Hat offers a solution at the right price that is quick and easy to implement and maintain, with guidance from expert support,” said Dalla Grana. “We also liked that their technologies work well together, so you can deploy in a gradual, step-by-step approach at your own pace.”
As the foundation of its new integrated system environment, the manufacturer deployed Red Hat Fuse and Red Hat AMQ, part of Red Hat Integration. Red Hat Fuse is a distributed integration platform that connects several of DAB’s systems, including those for enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI). Red Hat AMQ is a messaging platform that provides the reliable data delivery needed to support DAB’s business-to-business (B2B) platform with asynchronous messaging capabilities. Additionally, Red Hat Data Grid, part of Red Hat Runtimes, provides in-memory data storage that helps applications access, process, and analyze data for improved user experiences.
“Red Hat is helping us prepare our underlying approach to transform from a single, monolithic offering to be more services-based,” said Dalla Grana.
These solutions run on premise on Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), an application server for consistently deploying and managing critical Java™ applications across environments. Red Hat’s single sign-on (SSO) technology provides access across all of DAB’s Red Hat solutions, so users can securely access multiple business systems with one log-in process.
Creating an efficient, cloud-ready system environment
Streamlined user experience
With an integrated foundation supporting its local and centralized IT systems, DAB has improved its online user experience for internal teams and external customers, salespeople, and distributors.
For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the manufacturer to cancel its Milan Exhibition and move to an online product launch event, DAB took advantage of Red Hat’s SSO technology to easily register participants for the online event from around the world—and in compliance with the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. With a single set of credentials, registered users gained access to DAB's e-learning, B2B platform, and other resources for ongoing engagement after the event.
Additionally, DAB has improved information delivery with real-time integration. Red Hat AMQ routes communication between the manufacturer’s B2B platform and its ERP system to provide real-time order confirmations to customers.
Reduced service time to market by 60%
Rapid innovation is key to achieving DAB’s growth plans. Red Hat AMQ, AMQ streams—a component that provides high-throughput data exchange for microservices and other application components—and Red Hat Data Grid have helped the company expand its use of automation to speed routine, repeat processes.
Red Hat Fuse supports and connects popular frameworks, tools, and languages—such as SQL, Apache Camel, and MongoDB—to further speed development of new, innovative features and services and support iterative DevOps work.
“Red Hat Fuse lets all of our systems talk to each other in a standard way, helping us significantly reduce our code footprint and connect our microservices to deploy new services 60% faster,” said Luciano Di Leonardo, Enterprise Architect at DAB Pumps. “Higher-quality code is also easier and less time-consuming to maintain, helping our teams focus on customer-facing innovation.”
Created foundation for future cloud adoption
DAB plans to shift from datacenter-focused operations to cloud computing in the near future. A cloud environment will provide the resilience and scalability DAB needs to reliably serve its growing customer base at any scale—even during peak demand. Red Hat Fuse will also help the manufacturer reduce direct queries to its ERP system in preparation for the use-based cloud billing model.
“We need to be cloud-ready,” said Di Leonardo. “As an effective orchestrator, Red Hat Fuse will let us move to the cloud when the business is ready without any interruption to the services we deliver to our customers.”
Supporting business growth with new technology and approaches
Following the success of its first Red Hat implementations, DAB now plans to adopt a container- and microservices- development and delivery approach based on Red Hat OpenShift®. “Red Hat OpenShift provides a resilient enterprise container platform that will help us not only innovate at speed, but also continuously deliver high levels of service,” said Dalla Grana.
With its expanding Red Hat service environment, DAB can prepare to meet its growth goals and continue finding new opportunities to enhance customer and partner interactions.
“We don’t know where we will be in the future, so we need to be ready for whatever’s next,” said Dalla Grana. “Yesterday, the focus was in-person experiences, but today, it’s online or digital services. With Red Hat, we are ready to provide the right solution for whatever the business needs.”
About DAB Pumps
DAB Pumps was founded in Mestrino, Italy in 1975. Today, it is a multinational organization which specializes in water movement technologies. Sustainability, reliability, and innovation are the distinguishing features of its technological solutions in domestic, residential, civil and commercial applications, as well as in agricultural irrigation systems. DAB cares about the future by promoting a culture of growth and innovation based on people, technologies and environment. By retaining this focus, it has been able to establish a reputation as one of the leaders in this sector. dabpumps.com
