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June 06, 2022

Carpetright modernizes for business growth with Azure VMware Solution

The pandemic and the store closures that came with it for significant periods accelerated the sense of urgency at Carpetright to build up capabilities and agility by modernizing its technology infrastructure. Carpetright ultimately selected Azure VMware Solution for hosting VMware virtual machine environments on Azure while it trained its team. Since adopting Azure VMware Solution, Carpetright now has a more modern and secure infrastructure to help the business grow both organically and through acquisitions.

Carpetright

Smart businesses find ways to move quickly to seize opportunity without straining the structures or people supporting them. That’s what Carpetright did when it was time to modernize its technology infrastructure.

“With Azure VMware Solution, we found an easy path to a stable, reliable system that can forever evolve in the cloud.”

Danny Flynn, Head of Infrastructure and Support, Carpetright

Modernizing for accelerated growth 

Carpetright is a leading international retailer of carpets, hard flooring, and beds. Founded in 1988, the company has grown organically and through acquisition. Carpetright employs more than 2,000 people and trades from more than 300 stores and concessions in the United Kingdom. It also has an online presence and 120 stores across the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Republic of Ireland. 

When a new owner acquired Carpetright in 2020, the change brought new ambitions. Carpetright is the largest flooring retailer in the United Kingdom and has a goal of being the biggest across Europe. Carpetright wanted to be fully ready to accommodate this ambitious growth, and that includes transitioning from its legacy on-premises datacenters to the cloud. 

The pandemic and the store closures that came with it for significant periods accelerated the sense of urgency at Carpetright to build up capabilities and agility by modernizing its technology infrastructure. It wanted to be able to bounce back quickly from any future business interruptions, and it knew that modernizing its technology infrastructure would be a crucial element of that. 

Carpetright had two on-premises datacenters: one primary production datacenter and a disaster recovery datacenter. The environment had two clusters of 10 nodes each, with around 120 virtual machines in total, and it was nearing end of life. Carpetright was eager to move to the cloud so it could focus on increasing its business, not on running datacenters. As it sought more growth through acquisitions, Carpetright also wanted to position itself in the cloud to easily merge new businesses into its technology infrastructure. 

Creating a steppingstone for making an immediate shift to Azure

Carpetright already used several Microsoft products in its core business operations, including Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and it had some presence in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform as a result. The company initially considered migrating its on-premises environment to run on Azure natively, but the IT team first needed to develop its Azure skill sets. Carpetright ultimately selected Azure VMware Solution for hosting VMware virtual machine environments on Azure while it trained its team.

“We needed our cloud journey to start sooner rather than later,” says Danny Flynn, Head of Infrastructure and Support at Carpetright. “We recognized that Azure VMware Solution provided the right steppingstone for us toward Azure native. All our engineers have VMware skills, so they could start working with Azure VMware Solution straight away.”

Flynn and his team appreciated that they had a Microsoft technology choice that met them where they were in their cloud journey.

The team’s existing expertise and the support in Azure VMware Solution for a seamless move of VMware workloads to run on Azure made it easy for Carpetright to handle the migration. Microsoft provided assistance as needed through its United Kingdom Azure Specialist, Client Executive, and Global Black Belt team. Now, the Carpetright team can continue to use the same tools to manage the company’s VMware workloads while they add to their Azure skills.

Positioned for growth and hiring 

Since adopting Azure VMware Solution, Carpetright now has a more modern and secure infrastructure to help the business grow both organically and through acquisitions. “It’s much easier for us to take on smaller acquisitions and bring them onboard to our one Azure VMware Solution environment across the group,” says Dean Hughes, Infrastructure Manager at Carpetright. “By using Azure VMware Solution, we’re always ready and able to add a node and start folding in the new acquisition’s applications and data with the extra capacity.”

The whole process is much faster, too.

“Adding nodes used to take us at least three or four weeks. Now, we can add several nodes within a matter of one or two days with Azure VMware Solution,” Flynn says.

Carpetright recognized additional advantages with Azure, such as the multiple security layers that help protect Azure datacenters’ operations and infrastructure along with the physical sites themselves.

At a time when it is especially difficult to recruit IT talent due to the tight labor market, Carpetright knew that adopting innovative, cutting-edge technology would help differentiate it when recruiting new employees. Being at a company with modern Microsoft technology rather than at one still bogged down in maintaining two datacenters is more appealing for many potential hires.

Building business resiliency 

Carpetright can use the flexibility of Azure and Azure VMware Solution to scale up and down as needed in a way that was not possible with its on-premises datacenters. Carpetright can now think through new, innovative ways of using Azure and Azure VMware Solution to advance its business goals without worrying about the time and cost it would take to explore the same techniques in an on-premises datacenter. 

As its expansion continues, Carpetright now has one central point, the Azure portal, from which to manage its technology across different countries. And it can comply more easily with those locations’ different requirements and business regulations, too, thanks to the Azure global infrastructure’s scale and data residency options. That means flexibility and business resiliency for Carpetright as it grows. 

Looking ahead, Carpetright can now easily augment its cloud-based environment with AI, automation, advanced analytics, and other capabilities from within the Microsoft ecosystem. For example, it can take data from across the business, layer it with AI, put it into Microsoft Power BI, and use the analytics-generated insights to make informed strategic decisions. 

In addition to the variety of solutions at its disposal, Carpetright has the assurance that it can now quickly and easily adopt whatever new innovative technologies it chooses. “We no longer have to worry about hardware failures at our on-premises datacenters or about support for any antiquated technology,” Flynn says. “With Azure VMware Solution, we found an easy path to a stable, reliable system that can forever evolve in the cloud.”

Find out more about Carpetright on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“It’s much easier for us to take on smaller acquisitions and bring them onboard …. By using Azure VMware Solution, we’re always ready and able to add a node and start folding in the new acquisition’s applications and data with the extra capacity.”

Dean Hughes, Infrastructure Manager, Carpetright

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