Loyalty Pacific reaps bonus rewards with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Industry: Retail
Geography: Australia
Opportunity: As a rapidly expanding business, Loyalty Pacific needed a future-proof technology platform that was secure, reliable and efficient with a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), ease of administration and minimal maintenance
Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Fedora
Hardware: 21 Intel Xeon servers
Benefits: 100 per cent system uptime. 80% less time required for set up. 70% less time required for maintenance. Strong support capabilities. Timely release cycles.

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As the name behind Australia’s favourite rewards programs, FlyBuys and MYERone, the Loyalty Pacific Pty Ltd joint venture between Coles Group Limited and National Australia Bank was created in 1994 to establish and manage customer loyalty development and fulfillment initiatives. Today, more than 2.8 million Australian households actively use their FlyBuys cards each month.

Loyalty Pacific continues to be responsible for the business operations behind FlyBuys, including managing the call centre, brand marketing, commercial relationships, legals, financials and importantly, the technology infrastructure. The company also manages the technology infrastructure for MYERone.

Opportunity

According to Loyalty Pacific’s IT Manager, Mr Simran Gambhir, like many expanding businesses, one of the biggest technology challenges is finding an architecture that can grow with the business.

“Future business needs are often unclear, which makes it very difficult to confidently identify and stick to a technology platform for the long term,” says Mr Gambhir.

“What the business needs today - and what will continue to be critical for future growth - is a secure, reliable and efficient operating system that offers a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), ease of administration and minimal maintenance.”

Solution

Satisfying its need for a future-proof technology platform, Loyalty Pacific has been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 across both FlyBuys and MYERone sub- brands. The platform is the basis of Loyalty Pacific’s critical database servers, which house membership data for millions of customers. The platform is also at the of the dedicated member website.

Linux was always the only option for Loyalty Pacific, with no other platform able to match the value for money or reliability Linux could offer.

“Linux is one of the most reliable operating systems out there and provides an impressive value for money proposition, so it was an easy decision to install Fedora on a number of desktops and to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 on 25 of our web and applications servers.”

Benefits

It was Red Hat’s strong consulting and support capabilities and timely release cycles for updates and security patches that particularly appealed to Loyalty Pacific and differentiated Red Hat from other Linux alternatives.

Since implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company has also realised a number of other valuable benefits. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes with a good core set of applications that are very useful, and have enabled us to architect a load-balanced solution that provides us with 100 per cent uptime.”

“In comparison to old Windows servers, we’ve also noted significantly decreased set up times for new servers (reduced by approximately 80 per cent) and lower maintenance times on servers (reduced by about 70 per cent), which is of great value to our business.”

Loyalty Pacific continues to gear its business towards future success, and its technology strategy is core to ensuring ongoing growth. Looking ahead, the business will focus on a complete migration to open source, bringing any servers still on Windows across to Linux and switching databases to MySQL or PostgreSQL.

“The open source platform will enable Loyalty Pacific to meet current and future business needs, which makes it a critical part the company’s future - from the server right through to the desktop,” concludes Mr Gambhir.

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