Sainsbury’s Saves Tens of Millions with Third-Party IBM® Support | Retail
CASE STUDIES
4 min read
4 min read
Sainsbury’s is the U.K.’s second-largest supermarket chain. The retailer sells over 60,000 products. Its online store – the U.K.’s third most-visited site – relies on older versions of IBM® products to keep the store open for business round the clock.
Retail
Large
U.K.
U.K. retailer Sainsbury’s had been running one of the largest IBM software estates in the U.K., with 40,000 user devices, multiple servers, and millions of end points. Its IBM® products — Db2, Sterling, and MQ — were originally fit for purpose but designed for a much smaller business capacity.
As the company grew, the products began to repeatedly crash on the busiest and highest revenue-generating days, particularly Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The systems struggled to handle demand, causing outages that resulted in millions in lost revenue.
Sainsbury’s IT teams would typically wait for at least 12 hours and up to several days to get support from IBM. They were passed along to multiple technicians with no prior knowledge of Sainsbury’s software needs or configuration.
When Sainsbury’s went to IBM to seek a proactive solution that would help the company avoid this annual scenario and its financial impact, the only resolution offered by IBM was an upgrade to newer versions of their products.
Already under pressure to streamline spending as part of a broader cost-reduction initiative — and facing an imminent three-year IBM contract renewal — Sainsbury’s started looking at third-party support.
It wasn’t just the hike in monthly software spend that concerned Sainsbury’s; it was the real possibility of its systems further destabilizing as a result of interoperability issues with newer IBM® software versions.
What the company needed was a highly responsive support solution that would improve the performance of existing IBM® versions without requiring more budget.
What they got with Origina was so much more.
Sainsbury’s was looking to maintain its business-critical IBM® estate and avoid expensive and disruptive change programs, as well as reduce costs, maximize uptime, and see real ROI on its software support budget.
A tall order for most support outfits, but not for Origina.
Origina’s third-party support service was an ideal fit for Sainsbury’s. It offered a forward-thinking partnership that approached Sainsbury’s challenges proactively rather than reactively, helping the company to extend the value of its IBM® investments and prepare for future growth.
The Origina Solution Architecture Optimization team brought in its best IBM® WebSphere, IBM® Sterling, and IBM® Db2 experts to work alongside Sainsbury’s architects and reoptimize the environment to fit five to ten years of growth.
And the same experts were assigned to Sainsbury’s long term. Their IT team now gets direct, single-point-of-contact support and advice from Origina’s dedicated independent IBM® experts who consider Sainsbury’s IBM® intricacies and understand the company’s current and future business needs and objectives.
This shift from support incident reactivity to proactive support from a team of skilled and dedicated IBM® experts was the real value for Sainsbury’s.
By moving support and maintenance of IBM® WebSphere, IBM® Sterling, and IBM® Db2 to third-party support with Origina, Sainsbury’s was able to:
Sainsbury’s awarded Origina the overall winner in the “Save to Invest” category at their annual Sainsbury’s Tech Supplier Awards 2022. This award recognizes the positive impact the company has on Sainsbury’s cost-savings initiatives — a true testament of how Origina delivers with a concierge mindset for every customer.
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