Ulta Beauty deploys central automation platform
Ulta Beauty has selected an internal standard for automation transformation.
The largest beauty retailer in the U.S. is deploying the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as part of a three-phased transformation project to free up its IT teams by leveraging technology with greater speed and efficiency. Through this effort, Ulta Beauty says it has already saved thousands of hours a year in manual work with the open-source Ansible Automation Platform.
Ulta Beauty began its automation transformation initiative by introducing the technology to perform tasks such as automating the collection of failed hosts, enabling notifications, automating dynamic inventory, and standardizing code across tasks. Since the adoption of Ansible Automation Platform, Ulta Beauty says it has increased repeatability and time-to-value of automation.
The company also reports it has decreased the risk of downtime, increased system stability, accelerated incident remediation, and freed up thousands of technology associate hours to redeploy to higher-value initiatives.
For example, Ulta Beauty is migrating from a legacy, on-premises SAP ERP Central Component system to SAP S/4 HANA in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. These components typically take weeks of manual effort from several employees to deploy. Utilizing Ansible Automation Platform, Ulta Beauty decreased deployment time from three weeks down to less than a day.
As phase two of Ulta Beauty’s transformation project continues, Ulta Beauty and Red Hat have begun establishing communities of practice by connecting workflows, incorporating an automation component at the core of roles, and enabling data-driven ROI assessment for all automation projects.
In the future, Ulta Beauty plans to continue using Ansible Automation Platform for its third transformation phase, which will focus on driving automation as a core tool to effectively eliminate manual configuration management and deployment.
“Every organization with a large technological footprint is deploying in the cloud and building a hyperscaler strategy, so implementing tools that help us run better and faster in the cloud is critical,” said Jesse Amerson, IT director, Ulta Beauty. “We can directly deploy and run Ansible Automation Platform in the environments that we need to with the scale and speed that’s required. In addition, the built-in capabilities of Ansible Automation Platform provide an accelerator in a box. It’s the de facto standard that many of our vendors and partners also use to write scripts to install, configure and maintain their technology, which creates a network effect for professionals who utilize the platform.”
“Organizations now see automation success as extending beyond the confines of development operations to all functional teams,” said Thomas Anderson, VP, Ansible, Red Hat. “Red Hat’s vision is to support enterprises as their automation approaches expand, enabling customers to use Ansible Automation Platform as common ground for varying domains and disciplines, and ultimately drive a culture of automation.”
[Read more: Ulta Beauty develops cutting-edge digital experiences via ‘low code’ strategy]
Based in Bolingbrook, Ill., Ulta Beauty operates more than 1,300 retail stores across 50 states, and also distributes its products through its website.