Success Story
Brinker makes dining digital with Red Hat
Overview
Brinker International, Inc., the parent company of Chili’s Grill & Bar and Maggiano’s Little Italy, focuses on providing exceptional dining with innovative digital guest experiences. Brinker wanted to offer consistency for its guests across its mobile app, website, in-restaurant table kiosks, and curbside dining. Using Red Hat® solutions, Brinker built a unified e-commerce environment to support faster development and deployment, scale to meet peak traffic demands, and ensure the protection of guest data.
When we had to put a fix in place on a Friday at dinnertime, one of our busiest online ordering times, we completed deployment with no downtime. It worked flawlessly.
- INDUSTRY
Hospitality - REGION
North America - HEADQUARTERS
Dallas, Texas - SIZE
More than 900 corporate Chili’s locations and more than 300 franchise locations in the U.S.
Challenge
Unify digital platforms
Brinker’s digital guest offerings evolved to meet guest expectations, but its legacy technology couldn’t keep pace. The process to update website code took hours, required downtime, and didn’t guarantee a consistent configuration. “We wanted the flexibility to deploy code quickly, with minimal downtime, and on a continuous basis, instead of having to deploy, roll back, then deploy again,” said Pankaj Patra, senior director of IT enterprise solutions at Brinker. Brinker needed to unify its digital platforms in a new e-commerce environment to provide a more consistent guest experience and increase adoption of its digital offerings.
SOLUTION
Build an open source e-commerce environment
To incorporate the necessary innovation and flexibility, Brinker decided to use open source technology. It chose Red Hat’s platform as the foundation of its new e-commerce environment, which also hosts Chili’s new digital curbside service. Brinker incorporated Red Hat solutions for storage, management, and data analytics. “We’ve been a closed platform shop for 40 years,” said Patra. “But for this project, we didn’t want to get too tied to one technology, so we started looking at open source. There’s so much innovative development happening in open source communities.”
Software & Services
Business Outcome
Improve the guest experience
Brinker’s new e-commerce environment helps develop, test, and deploy new features and services faster. "When we had to put a fix in place on a Friday at dinnertime, one of our busiest online ordering times, we completed deployment with no downtime," said Nathan Huber, enterprise architect at Brinker. "It worked flawlessly."The new solution also reduces the time to build new development environments from months to minutes and allows Brinker to create and scale innovative apps to meet guest demand—and build loyalty. Also, new security features protect guests’ personal and payment information. “The innovation in open source is amazing,” said Huber. “When you have many minds working together, you can build a product that you can’t get from a proprietary offering.”
Red Hat has been a huge partner in helping us innovate and try technologies that are new to the industry. … We’re really excited about what the future brings.
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Additional customer stories
Open source fuels innovation. This fact is exemplified best by Red Hat’s customers, who are using open source technologies to change the game. We’re proud to call them "innovators in the open" and share their stories.
