Aging infrastructure is one reason that many companies make the decision to integrate cloud solutions. Trek, one of the largest bicycle manufacturers in the world, had a point-of-sale software called Ascend, with a development and test IT infrastructure based on an old VMware environment consisting of four servers, a SAN storage system, and limited on-premises licensing for VMware.
Steve Novoselac, Business Intelligence and .NET Development Manager at Trek Bicycle Corporation, describes it like this, “Managing the internal virtual lab was a logistical nightmare. There was little of use in the way of administrative tools for reporting with our in-house VMware farm. Self-service for developers and the QA team was all but impossible. And we were faced with critical challenges like doing multi-store configurations for testing against a German or UK environment. We needed a better solution, something that would support the Agile development we required.”
Beyond infrastructure, time is always a concern—no matter how large or small the company. And when it comes to cloud computing, an easy-to-use product that provides Agile infrastructure and fast provisioning of environments, while enabling increased collaboration across teams, will stand out. When Trek found itself in critical need of a flexible IT infrastructure that would let them quickly configure and deploy a wide variety of operating environments, they needed an affordable and scalable solution. During their research, they looked at enterprise versions of VMware and Amazon Web Services, and eventually landed on Skytap.
When asked how he made the final decision to use Skytap Cloud, Novoselac said, “When we looked at Skytap, we realized it would enable us to build all of the environments we needed from the ground up and that we would be able to do this incredibly fast.” He went on to say, “The decision to go with Skytap was a no-brainer. It was the least expensive option and provided the best overall solution for meeting our needs, while fitting with our long-term strategy.”
If you’d like to learn more about how Trek uses Skytap Cloud to simplify and expedite provisioning of IT environments for its development and test teams, read the full Trek case study on our site.
To learn more about Trek and living the two-wheeled life, visit http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en.
