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Brinker Selects Red Hat as Technology Partner to Revolutionize Digital Guest Experience

Red Hat-based e-commerce platform modernizes digital guest experience with innovative features and rapid deployment

RALEIGH, N.C. - —

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Brinker International, Inc., a leader in casual dining, has deployed several Red Hat solutions to deliver a consistent digital guest experience. Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Gluster Storage and supported by Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Insights, Brinker is aiming to transform the modern dining experience by unifying its digital platforms in a new, open source e-commerce environment.

Red Hat has been invaluable in helping us develop a solution that supports our current business needs, as well as new technologies we want to bring to the industry.

Nathan Huber

enterprise architect, Brinker International

The parent company of Chili’s Grill & Bar and Maggiano’s Little Italy, Brinker set out to update the digital platforms that supported its 900 corporate Chili’s Grill & Bar restaurants, including its mobile application, website, in-restaurant table kiosks and curbside dining.

To keep pace with its vision for a more modern and personal guest experience, the company sought an open source solution to bring its digital offerings together in one unified e-commerce environment. Brinker selected Red Hat as its technology partner to create an open source-based digital platform and deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the foundation for its new e-commerce environment, citing its ability to provide the flexibility to deploy new solutions quickly and continually. The new e-commerce environment created with Red Hat software helps Brinker develop, test, and deploy new features and services faster with a continuous development and deployment (CI/CD) approach. This has helped the company to reduce provisioning time from weeks or months to hours or minutes.

In addition, Brinker deployed Red Hat Gluster Storage as the container based storage platform to aggregate customer feedback data and to support the development, testing, integration, and production of new features. The scalable data management and real-time customer support of Red Hat Gluster Storage enabled Brinker to implement container-based persistent data storage to more rapidly deliver innovative features while maintaining a consistent user experience across multiple channels.

Brinker is also using the resource provisioning capabilities of Red Hat Satellite to enforce security protocols, enable updates, and enhance unique configurations across the Red Hat Gluster and Red Hat Enterprise Linux foundation. Brinker is using the predictive analytics capabilities of Red Hat Insights to increase visibility into system configuration and mitigate risks in real time.

Deploying the new environment to all corporate-owned Chili’s restaurants took less than a year and a half and, using the new platform, Brinker launched its new digital curbside service in less than eight weeks. The collaborative power of open source innovation, combined with Red Hat’s award-winning global support has given Brinker the capacity to test, deploy, and implement innovative services within its new e-commerce environment, with zero downtime. The company has had such positive results with the deployment of its new e-commerce environment that it is now expanding its online system to its 400 franchise restaurants, as well as its Maggiano’s restaurants.

Supporting Quotes

Nathan Huber, enterprise architect, Brinker International

“There is so much innovative development going on in open source communities today, and we knew we needed to tap into it to create the kind of environment we were after, but in the early stages we needed additional security expertise and support from a vendor partner. Red Hat has been invaluable in helping us develop a solution that supports our current business needs, as well as new technologies we want to bring to the industry.”

Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Storage

“Organizations are consistently looking for ways to modernize and scale their infrastructure, while providing flexibility, and many have found containers to be the answer. Forward thinking organizations, like Brinker understand that for modernization efforts and their container journey to be successful, a modern approach to storage is essential. Red Hat's software-defined storage solutions deliver more secure and elastic persistent storage for containers that can help businesses accelerate their business by developing, implementing and supporting new, data centric services.”

  • About Red Hat

  • Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.



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