Greencore tastes success with Adapt’s software-defined Habitat

With 12,000 employees and 25 manufacturing sites in the UK and the US, Greencore Group is a fast growing international convenience food leader serving all of the major UK retailers and the convenience store, small store and grocery channel in the US. Greencore turned to Adapt to deliver a reduction in data centre costs, reduce risk and create the agility to help accommodate potential future acquisition and expansion.

Greencore’s vision of transforming its IT into a dynamic set of services was held back by its existing data centre environment and the expense involved in upgrading its in house capability. As a high growth, rapidly expanding business, Greencore wanted to capitalise on the efficiencies and competitive gains afforded by the latest enterprise technologies, delivered on a predictable, efficient operational cost model. This shift would allow Greencore to assimilate new business more readily and deliver a consistent set of global services to its customers.

Chris Smith, Head of Infrastructure at Greencore explained: “Our business involves multiple channels and requires deep logistical planning – our core applications are absolutely critical to the delivery of Greencore’s proposition. We went through a very thorough RFP process, assessing three service providers in detail. We finally selected Adapt and its software-defined Habitat for its elastic capability and ongoing alignment with our business, however we grow and change in the future.”

Adapt’s tiered, fluid software-defined data centre (the Habitat) presented the ideal solution to meet Greencore’s requirement for agile, cost-efficient infrastructure. The innovative design provides Greencore with the ability to centralise and consolidate applications, allowing for accelerated integration during expansionary activity with the advantage of a predictable OPEX delivery model.

Adapt’s Habitat comprises multiple, tiered platforms that satisfy customers’ changing usage profiles: Consume, Perform and Exceed. This flexible design means that Greencore can rapidly scale resources with demand - during the Christmas season, for example, the applications responsible for the production and delivery of festive products can be easily elevated to the ‘Exceed’ layer for optimal performance, then moved dynamically to the ‘Consume’ layer for maximum cost efficiency when demand or the level of criticality has lessened. Greencore’s business-as-usual functions like telephony, Intranet and normal web traffic typically reside in the middle tier, Perform, but can be promoted or demoted as required.

Smith continued: “Adapt’s Habitat is completely aligned with the way our business operates. We manufacture around 600 million fresh sandwiches every year and around 200 million ready meals and it’s crucial that our IT resources reflect the changes in our business across the year. Working with Adapt allows us to deliver excellence to our customers whilst taking advantage of the most efficient, cutting edge technologies.”

Scotty Morgan, Chief Sales Officer at Adapt said: “We are very proud that Greencore has selected Adapt as a technology partner to support the next exciting phase of their growth. Our Habitat proposition offers businesses with shifting priorities like Greencore, high efficiency targets and ambitious growth trajectories with the freedom to rethink and reshape their environments over and over as they expand and change – and helping these businesses win in their markets is what it’s all about for us.”