How Office Depot Optimizes ERP by 20% with SPARC and Solaris

Office Depot simplifies IT architecture and reduces complexity with Oracle E-Business Suite applications, Oracle’s Sun SPARC platform, and the Oracle Solaris platform.

Office Depot is one of the largest retailers of office supply products in the world with over 900 stores in the United States and another 400-500 in Europe and the Middle East.

Their challenge was that they couldn’t scale their Oracle ERP applications on their current hardware platform, so they made the move from an x86 architecture to a SPARC and Solaris platform to get better scalability and reliability.

This wasn't a decision to be taken lightly. Oracle ERP is Office Depot's largest application with the largest workload. The company supports over 40,000 employees on this platform alone.

“We needed something that we could just put in and operate,” says Marshall Lew, Sr. Director of Computing Platforms at Office Depot.

The Benefits
What Office Depot saw was a 20% improvement in application performance on the SPARC and Solaris platform, with Oracle database running on top of it.

“Oracle database runs on many platforms, but on Solaris it really leverages the horsepower, engineering and design of the SPARC architecture and how it handles memory and core processing.”
--Marshall Lew, Sr. Director of Computing Platforms at Office Depot

“Before, it was always a challenge to get all of the different components working together. With Solaris and with Oracle database on top of it, it made it a lot easier,” says Lew. “From paper to production, the SPARC and Solaris combination was a much more simplified architecture, with a lot less complexity.”

To learn more about the success that Office Depot is having, watch this video:

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