Keytree helps Luxottica consolidate their global data centre locations

Luxottica is a global leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of fashion, luxury and sports eyewear with high technical and stylistic quality. The brand portfolio includes iconic proprietary brands such as Ray-Ban, Oakley, Vogue Eyewear, Persol, Oliver Peoples and Alain Mikli.

Luxottica’s global wholesale distribution network covers more than 150 countries and is complemented by an extensive retail network of over 7,200 stores, featuring LensCrafters and Pearle Vision in North America, OPSM and LensCrafters in Asia-Pacific, GMO in Latin America and Sunglass Hut worldwide.

“Keytree gave us the opportunity to capitalise on all the best parts of cloud technology so that we could concentrate on delivering state of the art applications and services that provide real business benefits.”

Dr. Stephen McKinnon – CIO at Luxottica Australia

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Migrating onto SAP HANA

In 2013 Luxottica was on an ambitious journey of trying to consolidate their global data centre locations down to a pair based in North America. In parallel, Luxottica Australia was trying to move their multi-terabyte Oracle-based SAP BW and CRM systems onto an SAP HANA based platform with the lowest Total Cost of Ownership possible.

The solution proposed offered an appliance-based system which was not hugely flexible and would need significant capital investment for it to be deployed. Luxottica was interested in other options that would provide them with an OPEX based purchasing model and allow them to spend money on innovation, which was made possible by deploying SAP HANA.

Keytree had already helped Luxottica migrate their SAP PO system to the latest version in a structured and risk-free way, so they returned and asked Keytree to provide a range of different options. Keytree met with Luxottica to review requirements including the following:

  • Migrate SAP BW and CRM systems from Australia to North America
  • Migrate the database platform from Oracle to SAP HANA
  • Provide a flexible platform that limits the compute costs when the environments are not required
  • Provide automation around the standard operational aspects of backup, availability and scaling

It was evident from the start that a cloud-based solution based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the ideal fit and within a matter of days, Keytree had migrated the development systems to a Keytree operated AWS Virtual Private Cloud. This approach provided Luxottica with an easy way to verify the solution without any long-term commitment. In light of the ease with which it was established, Luxottica agreed to move other environments onto AWS.

The systems were mature and large systems, but the experts from Keytree were able to design a suitable technical platform using the ‘scale out’ architecture of AWS and SAP HANA that could quickly and efficiently host the systems. The automation that was designed and built before ever migrating a system provided Luxottica with the benefit of operating the systems only during user work patterns – this drastically reduced the cost of the compute costs from AWS by 60 percent.

The move to an SAP HANA based platform, incorporating cloud technology with the benefits of AWS provided Luxottica with the ideal solution. Dr Stephen McKinnon, CIO Luxottica Australia said: “Keytree gave us the opportunity to capitalise on all the best parts of cloud technology so that we could concentrate on delivering state of the art applications and services that provide real business benefit.”