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EDUCATION

MORE THAN

1,400 EMPLOYEES

BENEFITS

• Accelerated software

deployment from hours

to minutes to implement

customer feedback and

make updates faster

• Improved stability of

Kubernetes and virtual

machine (VM) environments

• Simplified and automated

IT management, increasing

staff efficiency and

improving resource use

SOFTWARE AND SERVICES

Red Hat® OpenShift

Container Platform

Red Hat Ansible® Automation

Red Hat Consulting

Follett School Solutions, a leading provider of educational materials and technology applications

for PreK-12 schools, needed to modernize its software development and deployment processes.

To shift from deploying apps to servers using CDs and printed instructions to a virtual approach,

the company worked with Red Hat Consulting to migrate to Red Hat OpenShift Container

Platform. With OpenShift, Follett can develop, deploy, and manage applications faster and more

easily by taking advantage of technology innovation, including containers and automation.

As a result, the company can make customer-requested changes and launch new learning appli-

cations to schools faster.

HEADQUARTERS

“At this point, we can’t imagine deploying applications without OpenShift.”

JERRY THOME

ARCHITECT, FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS

McHenry, IL, United States

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS SPEEDS APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT WITH RED HAT OPENSHIFT

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2redhat.com CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Follett speeds delivery of leading educational apps with Red Hat OpenShift

COMPLEX DEPLOYMENT SLOWS INNOVATION

Follett School Solutions is the largest provider of educational materials and technology solutions

for PreK-12 libraries, learning centers, and schools in the United States, as well as a major supplier

to educational institutions worldwide. The company offers a broad catalog of learning applications

for students. For example, its flagship application, Follett Destiny, is a complete library and resource

management system available 24x7 from any location.

Follett Destiny was initially installed and updated using ISO images, distributed via CDs. As this offer-

ing grew, additional applications were released using a similar packaging and deployment process.

The creation and deployment process for these CDs was time-consuming, required following detailed

instructions, and involved many manual steps. After development teams generated the ISO images,

the operations team installed the software on each server in the company’s many IT environments.

As a result, the company shifted to less frequent but more complex releases that created new devel-

opment and deployment challenges.

To improve its processes and better support its applications, Follett began a continuous delivery ini-

tiative. As part of this initiative, the company sought to adopt a more modular IT architecture to help

developers iterate quickly, reduce bugs, and launch fixes to production faster.

“Deployment was a very lengthy, manual process,” said Jerry Thome, an IT architect at Follett School

Solutions. “Follett was a pioneer in agile development years ago, but we we needed to realign our

processes and get features to our customers faster and achieve high ROI [return on investment] on

software. We also needed to increase our system resource use.”

OPENSHIFT OFFERS FASTER, EASIER APP CREATION

During the search for a more agile solution, Follett’s IT team was drawn to Kubernetes — an easy-to-

use open source container orchestration platform for automating application deployment, scaling,

and management — to support its new pipeline and container strategy.

To take full advantage of these capabilities in a high-availability configuration, Follett chose to

deploy Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as the foundation of its application environment.

OpenShift Container Platform is the leading enterprise distribution of Kubernetes, optimized for

continuous development and multitenant deployment. In addition to speeding and simplifying appli-

cation creation and management, OpenShift includes tools for long-term life-cycle maintenance of

teams and applications.

Follett also uses Red Hat Ansible Automation to orchestrate builds and migrate code to prefabri-

cated virtual machines (VMs) for noncontainerized applications. This solution supports a continuous

delivery approach and mitigates downtime for customer-facing services and applications.

“We’ve tested using Ansible to automate management of our JavaTM-based programs, create simple

scripts for complicated microservice deployments, and manage software on build servers,” said

David Chwalisz, principal developer at Follett. “It’s extremely powerful and easy to use.”

To deploy these software solutions as its environment for new applications, Follett’s IT team

worked with Red Hat Consulting. “Our Red Hat consultants were fantastic, very engaging, profes-

sional, and knowledgeable,” said Thome. “They helped us set up OpenShift and make sure every-

thing was working well.”

“With OpenShift as our foundation, we have the

ability and confidence to get features to

production faster.”

JERRY THOME

ARCHITECT,

FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS

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3redhat.com CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Follett speeds delivery of leading educational apps with Red Hat OpenShift

RED HAT SOFTWARE STREAMLINES I.T. OPERATIONS

FASTER, MORE AGILE DEPLOYMENT

With OpenShift supporting its continuous delivery approach, Follett migrates changes daily, instead

of monthly or even semi-annually. The company’s IT team demonstrates new features for early

adopter customers on a biweekly basis to gather feedback and quickly make improvements — some-

times completing daily bug fixes.

In addition, operations teams can now deploy the updated software virtually in minutes, rather

than hours. Both development and operations teams can focus on valuable, innovative work, rather

than routine tasks. As a result, Follett can rapidly deploy new features to customers — and ultimately

better meet their needs.

“With OpenShift as our foundation, we have the ability and confidence to get features to produc-

tion faster,” said Thome. “For example, our newest application, Collections by Destiny, lets teachers

aggregate materials, like websites and PDFs, then turn them into lesson plans. Our customers were

blown away by the number of positive changes we were able to produce every two weeks.”

GREATER STABILITY

As a robust enterprise distribution, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform also provides a reliable

foundation for Follett’s customer-facing offerings — including resolving occasional networking and

node issues with the company’s Kubernetes cluster. OpenShift centralized logging, combined with a

third-party monitoring solution, helps Follett discover the root causes of issues and fix them quickly.

Using OpenShift also helps reduce risk of system degradation during peak use.

“Stability is a huge benefit of Red Hat OpenShift. We don’t have to continually monitor systems or

restart nodes manually when they fail. OpenShift does it automatically,” said Thome. “When our

Collections app went live, OpenShift was stable and did everything we needed. When nodes went

down, OpenShift immediately and automatically brought them back up. At this point, we can’t

imagine deploying applications without OpenShift.”

SIMPLER, MORE EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT

OpenShift Container Platform also helps Follett optimize its IT resource use. Previously, the com-

pany’s VMs were not fully utilized. Follett’s IT staff sought ways to be more efficient, especially as

development teams began building smaller services.

“We were simply guessing the number and size of virtual machines we needed,” said Thome.

“Creating a new VM took a lot of work, and we didn’t really know how many CPUs or how much

memory they were using. Now, using OpenShift to deploy and manage our containers and container-

ized apps, we have real-time visibility into where containers are being deployed, as well as how much

CPU and memory are being used by our VMs.”

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FOLLETT COMMITS TO AGILE, CONTAINER-SUPPORTED FUTURE

After its initial success with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Ansible Automation,

Follett plans to continue deploying new applications on OpenShift and is researching strategies for

eventually transitioning legacy apps to the Red Hat environment. The company also plans to con-

tinue researching ways to expand its continuous delivery approach and use of container technology.

For example, Follett is considering customizing OpenShift to better meet business needs — such as

scaling based on different conditions for dramatic seasonal traffic shifts.

With the agility and stability of OpenShift, Follett can continue to mitigate operational issues and

instead focus on creating innovative applications for schools and students.

“Our charter for the next year is to keep launching new applications into OpenShift and keep getting

better at it, so that we can write the best applications for our users,” said Thome.

ABOUT FOLLETT SCHOOL SOLUTIONS

Follett is the largest provider of educational materials and technology solutions to PreK-12 librar-

ies, classrooms, learning centers and school districts in the United States and a major supplier to

educational institutions worldwide. Follett distributes books, reference materials, digital resources,

e-books, and audiovisual materials, as well as pre-owned textbooks. Follett also is one of the leading

providers of integrated educational technology for the management of physical and digital assets,

the tracking, storing, and analyzing of academic data, and digital learning environment tools for the

classroom focusing on student achievement. Learn more at follettlearning.com.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Follett speeds delivery of leading educational apps with Red Hat OpenShift

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