Brooks Brothers frequently launches new business initiatives, which helps the company stay competitive in the retail industry. The organization needed a more agile way of quickly testing these new projects. “When we embark on a new initiative, as with anything in the retail industry, it has a short timeframe from the initial idea to solving business needs, as driven by consumer preferences,” says Philip Miller, director of infrastructure and technical engineering at Brooks Brothers. “We’re very good at deploying technology that will exist for the long term in our data center, but we’ve struggled to spin up resources for testing new projects. We wanted to become more agile in moving concepts into an environment we could easily access and possibly move into production.”The organization was also seeking a more cost-effective way to manage its SAP HANA in-memory database management system, which would support a new customer relationship management (CRM) application. “We wanted to save money when we implemented the CRM system on SAP HANA, and we also wanted to be able to test out new projects on that platform,” says Miller.