Ulta Beauty deploys Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
US retailer, Ulta Beauty, has selected the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as its internal standard for automation transformation.
This is part of a three phased transformation project to free up IT teams by deploying technology with greater speed and efficiency.
Ulta Beauty began by introducing the technology to a smaller group of experts for cross environment implementation. This included tasks like automating the collection of failed hosts, enabling notifications, automating dynamic inventory and standardising code across tasks.
Since the adoption of Ansible Automation Platform, the retailer says that it has increased repeatability and time to value of automation. The team has decreased the risk of downtime, increased system stability, accelerated incident remediation and freed up thousands of technology team hours to redeploy to higher value initiatives.
A critical project for Ulta Beauty was its SAP digital transformation, migrating from the legacy, on-premises system (SAP ERP Central Component) to SAP S/4 HANA in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
These components typically take weeks of manual effort from several team members to deploy, with an increased risk of human error given the scale and complexity of the work.
With Ansible Automation Platform, Ulta Beauty decreased deployment time from three weeks down to less than a day.
As phase two of the project gains momentum, Red Hat and Ulta Beauty have begun establishing communities of practice, bringing teams together by connecting workflows, incorporating an automation component at the core of roles and enabling data driven ROI assessment for all automation projects.
Ulta Beauty plans to continue using Ansible Automation Platform for its third phase, which will focus on driving automation as a core part of the toolkit to effectively eliminate manual configuration management and deployment.
Thomas Anderson, Vice President, Ansible, Red Hat, says: “Organisations now see automation success as extending beyond the confines of DevOps to all functional teams.”
“Red Hat’s vision is to support enterprises as their automation approaches expand, enabling customers to use Ansible Automation Platform as common ground for varying domains and disciplines, and ultimately drive a culture of automation.”
Jesse Amerson, IT Director, Ulta Beauty, says: “Every organisation with a large technological footprint is deploying in the cloud and building a hyperscaler strategy, so implementing tools that help us run better and faster in the cloud is critical.”
“We can directly deploy and run Ansible Automation Platform in the environments that we need to with the scale and speed that’s required. In addition, the built-in capabilities of Ansible Automation Platform provide an accelerator in a box.”
“It’s the de facto standard that many of our vendors and partners also use to write scripts to install, configure and maintain their technology, which creates a network effect for professionals who utilise the platform.”
