B&Q China Realizes Dream of a Home in the Cloud

Plans to upgrade and transform

B&Q China is a leading player in China’s home improvement sector. Part of British Fortune 500 group Kingfisher, the business has developed rapidly since entering the Chinese market in 1999. It currently has 38 stores in 17 cities.

With the development of China’s economy, there is increasing demand for personalized home improvement. As B&Q’s Chinese business continues to grow, its IT requirements are also increasing. It needs a stable, robust and flexible infrastructure and application services environment, simple IT management, system upgrades that do not affect business continuity, and the continued renewal of ageing infrastructure. Upgrading and updating the existing IT system had become an urgent matter.

“The old core business systems had been in place for six or seven years. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the speed of information technology development. If we replaced the old servers, it would be a major investment for the company. From a retail industry perspective, IT system performance is directly related to business efficiency and sales performance. Upgrading IT systems was absolutely necessary,” says B&Q China’s CIO, Dong Jianping. “We had two options. Either complete the replacement of the old servers or use a managed lease. Following careful consideration and assessment, we concluded that the second approach was more feasible.”

Building on a longe-term relationship

B&Q China’s co-operation with HPE, now DXC Technology, dates back a long time. Both parties had collaborated back in 2004, with DXC providing services including onsite desktop support and multi vendor infrastructure management. In 2009, DXC and B&Q signed a new agreement that included fully managed IT services.

DXC completed IT projects such as the migration of Exchange, SAP R/3 and SAP BW for B&Q. In 2010, both parties renewed the contract for DXC Workplace Support Services, renewed again in 2012. “HPE (now DXC) has a profound understanding of our IT service requirements and B&Q trusts DXC solutions and services,” says Jianping.

In 2015, collaboration between the two organizations continued. DXC continued to serve as B&Q’s IT outsourcing vendor, providing infrastructure management and business application client support. As part of the agreement, DXC provided B&Q with workplace services including Managed Virtual Private Cloud services, to help B&Q upgrade and achieve the business transformation it desired.

DXC also continued to provide B&Q China with expanded infrastructure management services during this collaborative project. In order to implement a hybrid cloud architecture, the DXC team used a Managed Virtual Private Cloud solution to migrate B&Q’s business to a more flexible and reliable environment.

Flexibility and cost-effectiveness

With the help of a virtual cloud, hosted within a managed environment, B&Q China gained a more flexible and cost-effective environment to meet its growing business needs. By using an open and integrated cloud platform, the company will not need to reestablish and manage its own equipment or data center in the future.

Applications and workload solutions can then be deployed, greatly reducing IT migration costs. In addition, a multitenant platform designed and built specifically for businesses meets B&Q’s workload requirements for deploying high-end applications in a secure cloud environment.

“The HPE (now DXC) team was very professional,” says Jianping. “Due to the nature of the retail industry, they were clear that B&Q’s Chinese business would not be brought to a standstill."

Consequently, the process of migration and switchover from old to new servers could not, and would not, affect the normal day-to-day operation of stores. We had very detailed discussions with HPE (now DXC) at every step, during which they made some great suggestions. With HPE’s (now DXC) professional support, our entire upgrade process went smoothly. Even on the day when the migration and switchover from the old to new servers took place, it did not affect normal business operations.”

New future for IT

In the era of the creative economy, companies need a future where IT and business are truly inseparable. According to Jianping, “B&Q China is currently transforming as a business. We are attaching more and more importance to the internet and already have more than 10 online stores. This year we hope to have both online and offline breakthroughs with both our B2B and B2C offerings. Introducing a Managed Virtual Private Cloud Solution has laid a solid foundation for our future business transformation.”

DXC’s collaboration with B&Q will also create a flexible, secure, highly mobile future based on cloud computing. This will help B&Q to implement more efficient and flexible business innovations that meet the requirements of modern home improvements without day-to-day disruption of its business.

B&Q, and even the home improvement industry as a whole, is upgrading and transforming to new forms of business, laying a solid foundation for the dream of a home in the cloud.

B&Q China is a leading player in China’s home improvement sector. Part of British Fortune 500 group Kingfisher, the business has developed rapidly since entering the Chinese market in 1999. It currently has 38 stores in 17 cities.

With the development of China’s economy, there is increasing demand for personalized home improvement. As B&Q’s Chinese business continues to grow, its IT requirements are also increasing. It needs a stable, robust and flexible infrastructure and application services environment, simple IT management, system upgrades that do not affect business continuity, and the continued renewal of ageing infrastructure. Upgrading and updating the existing IT system had become an urgent matter.

“The old core business systems had been in place for six or seven years. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the speed of information technology development. If we replaced the old servers, it would be a major investment for the company. From a retail industry perspective, IT system performance is directly related to business efficiency and sales performance. Upgrading IT systems was absolutely necessary,” says B&Q China’s CIO, Dong Jianping. “We had two options. Either complete the replacement of the old servers or use a managed lease. Following careful consideration and assessment, we concluded that the second approach was more feasible.”