How Amway China cut IT operations work by 50% with Red Hat

As a globally recognized direct selling business, Amway China is navigating digital transformation and the rise of AI technologies by choosing Red Hat as its partner to build a digital infrastructure platform based on Red Hat technologies. This approach not only avoids the risks of relying on a single technology vendor, it also ensures stable support for its core systems and significantly accelerates the pace of digital intelligence innovation, turning IT capabilities into true competitive power that drives growth.

Benefits:

• Reduced infrastructure risks with improved controllability
• Enhanced operational efficiency, enabling a shift to an innovation-oriented model
• Provided a unified, secure, and flexible foundation for AI

As a globally recognized leader in consumer goods and the health industry, Amway China’s operations cover the entire value chain—from raw material cultivation, smart farming, product research and development to manufacturing and sales services. To empower the business, Amway China’s IT team has undergone multiple rounds of technology upgrades to support rapid transformation and growth. With the rapid development of digital intelligence technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, Amway China’s business systems are facing unprecedented challenges, and the requirements for its infrastructure platform have become increasingly demanding.

“In the digital era, our technology infrastructure must meet three seemingly contradictory requirements at the same time: stability, security, and agility,” said James Zhan, Head of Infrastructure, Amway China. “The original single cloud platform was stable, but also created issues such as vendor lock-in, poor flexibility, and high costs. As we advance our AI strategy, we need a platform that can support stable-state operations while rapidly responding to agile innovation.”

Amway China faces a number of key challenges, first of which is the issue of relying on a single cloud platform. This not only leads to the possibility of continuously rising and uncontrolled costs, but also weakens the company’s ability to withstand potential risks.

“We cannot put all our eggs in one basket. We want our infrastructure to be heterogeneous and controllable,” said Zhan. “This avoids being tied to a single vendor, helps to improve the stability and security of our infrastructure, and—more importantly—ensures that we retain autonomy in our technology choices.”

Following a thorough evaluation, Amway China chose to deepen its collaboration with Red Hat, using Red Hat’s hyperconverged solution to build a disaster recovery site for its cloud platform. This enables a heterogeneous, active, and highly controllable infrastructure.

The solution adopts Red Hat OpenShift as a unified container platform to host core systems, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to provide a unified workspace for digital applications, Red Hat Hosted Control Planes (HyperShift) to unify the management of both virtualized and containerized workloads, and the ODF storage solution to centralize resource management.

Amway China’s partnership with Red Hat has a long history. “We have been working with Red Hat for nearly 20 years,” said Zhan. “From the early days of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the later Red Hat OpenShift container platform, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, and now the future-oriented Red Hat OpenShift AI solutions, Red Hat has always been a critical partner in our technological evolution.”

The new platform adopts an ‘open source plus in-house development’ strategy. The underlying layer uses Red Hat OpenShift to build a unified container platform, while the middle layer incorporates widely used open source cloud-native databases and messaging middleware. The top layer consists of Amway China’s self-developed business applications.

This infrastructure ensures both technological openness and full autonomy over business operations. The platform allows highly flexible business systems to be deployed on the public cloud, while long-running, lower-flexibility requirements, security-sensitive systems such as the commission calculation system for marketers, and the business’s sales management system can be deployed on a private cloud built with Red Hat’s hyperconverged solution.

Implementation of this platform was a smooth process. This was partly a result of the strong compatibility of Red Hat’s platform, which enabled seamless deployment on existing hardware while ensuring a high degree of compatibility with current software applications. It was also supported by Red Hat’s extensive open source ecosystem, backed by a large global community, which allowed Amway China to resolve deployment issues quickly and accelerate the platform’s go-live process.

Throughout the collaboration, Red Hat consistently delivered thoughtful and outstanding service. Its team provided all-round, hands-on support, from co-creating the infrastructure during the design phase, to step-by-step guidance during deployment, and even joint troubleshooting when issues arose.

“Red Hat is not just a technology provider—it’s an enabler,” said Zhan. “During the project’s implementation, the Red Hat team guided us step by step to strengthen our capabilities. The value of this deep collaboration goes far beyond the products themselves.”

Red Hat platform provides comprehensive protection to meet Amway China’s stringent data integrity requirements. Within a microservices infrastructure, Red Hat OpenShift offers fine-grained authentication and access control to secure communication between services, ensuring that unauthorized personnel cannot access critical data.

Red Hat OpenShift also enables automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management of containerized applications, while supporting zero-downtime maintenance to ensure timely patching and vulnerability fixes. The high level of resilience combined with private deployment eliminates Amway China’s concerns over risk and allows core systems to run reliably on the platform.

Reduced infrastructure risks with improved platform controllability and flexibility

After a year of deployment and optimization, Amway China has successfully used the Red Hat hyperconverged platform to build a heterogeneous active-active system that delivers multidimensional transformation benefits and effectively supports business innovation.

The introduction of Red Hat’s hyperconverged solution has helped Amway China to avoid infrastructure lock-in risks. Even in the event of major unforeseen incidents, the platform can continue operating with stability. In addition, through containerization, a microservices infrastructure, and multiple high-availability measures, Amway China has reduced system failure points and ensured long-term stable operation of its core systems.

“By adopting Red Hat’s hyperconverged solution, we built a stable and efficient disaster-recovery site, reduced our risks around vendor lock-in, and significantly strengthened our confidence in driving digital transformation,” said Zhan. “We hope that through continued development in the coming years, we can further enhance the robustness of our infrastructure.”

Enhanced operational efficiency, enabling a shift to an innovation-oriented model

“By introducing Red Hat’s unified platform, our operations work has undergone a fundamental shift,” Zhan said. “In the past, the team had to devote 80% of its time to operations monitoring and troubleshooting. Now, that figure has dropped to 30-40%.”

The freed-up capacity allows the team to focus more on business innovation and forward-looking technical research. The improvement in operational efficiency has also driven a cultural shift within the operations team, transforming it into an innovative unit capable of responding agilely to transformational challenges.

Provided a unified, secure, and flexible foundation for AI

As AI sweeps across the globe, Amway China has already laid a solid foundation for its digitalization journey. From online purchases accounting for less than 5% of transactions to nearly 100% full-process digitization, and from building a comprehensive suite of social tools to using data for more refined customer service, Amway China is driving the large-scale implementation of AI applications. These include smart farming and smart manufacturing.

The powerful and flexible resource-scheduling capabilities provided by Red Hat’s hyperconverged solution, along with its comprehensive and transparent technology stack, enable Amway China to consistently deploy and manage AI workloads on its existing infrastructure and empower every link of Amway’s business chain. “We will continue to expand our AI strategy by building on our digital infrastructure and leveraging Red Hat’s AI capabilities,” Zhan said.

Based on the current project achievements, Amway China will use the Red Hat hyperconverged platform to drive the widespread adoption of innovative applications such as production digital twins. This will enable collaboration between cloud and edge devices to achieve full-process visualization and traceability, enhance digital capabilities in quality tracking and raw material provenance, and advance continuous process optimization and operational efficiency.

“When the power of technology merges with the wisdom and experience of our marketing partners, this AI transformation is no longer a challenge but a tremendous opportunity for people and technology to grow together and share the future,” Zhan said.

And as the wave of digitization grows, the Red Hat hyperconverged platform has enabled Amway China to efficiently manage foundational resources, giving the company far greater agility throughout its transformation.

“In the future, we will explore more AI-focused initiatives with Red Hat and drive the adoption of large AI models in manufacturing, marketing, and other fields to deliver even better products and services to consumers,” Zhan said.

Amway China was officially established in 1995. After nearly 30 years of development, its operations now cover 31 provinces and regions across the country. Amway China has also received widespread recognition from multiple sectors, and by the end of 2023 it had accumulated 10,755 awards, including 877 national-level honors.

In 2023, aligned with the corporate strategy ‘In China for China’ and the national goal of ‘fulfilling people’s aspirations for a better life’, Amway China upgraded its wellness strategy and introduced the value proposition of ‘Bloom for a Better Life’.

The company is committed to becoming “the most trusted provider of better-living solutions for consumers and the preferred entrepreneurial platform for those who aspire to promote better living”, offering comprehensive, integrated solutions that help more consumers enjoy a better life.