Case Study
Data Management
Enables Clorox’s Digital
Brand Strategy
Delphix helps modernize IT operations, reduce
delays, and improve application quality
The Clorox Company
Industry
Consumer packaged goods
Products & Services
Cleaning and household products
Headquarters
Oakland, CA, USA
Revenue
$5.7B
Employees
7,700
Background
Clorox is a worldwide manufacturer and marketer of consumer packaged goods.
Clorox brands include its namesake bleach and a growing line of cleaning and other
household products sold through mass merchandisers, retail outlets, e-commerce
channels, distributors, and medical supply providers.
Customer Challenges
For 100 years, The Clorox Company has been a pioneering enterprise, fostering
a culture of innovation, collaboration, and idea sharing across its diverse, global
workforce. When the rise of new digital technologies began to change consumer
behavior in the mid-2000s, Clorox began transforming its business model –
developing a digital strategy that would help strengthen both its brand and
customer relationships. Ralph Loura became the CIO of Clorox in early 2010, and
his immediate priority was to modernize the company’s IT operations and adopt
technologies and ideas that would support Clorox’s growth, even amid the global
economic downturn.
Changes in consumer shopping habits threatened to erode their loyalty to the
Clorox brand. “In 2008, to reach 80% of our customers, we only needed to work
with five retailers,” says Loura. “In 2010, we needed 48 retailers. This is how fast our
customers’ shopping and buying behaviors were changing.” The key to succeeding
in this new digital marketplace was to own the relationship with the customer,
which meant making digital strategy a fundamental part of the company’s core
competency. It also required Clorox to forge stronger partnerships between the
business and IT. “We needed to better engage IT, make them care more about the
brand, the consumers. Only then could they fulfill their role of providing the business
with the tools and abilities to become more agile,” adds Loura.
One of the key obstacles impeding Clorox’s digital transformation journey was
enormous amounts of data that needed to be managed across the organization.
“Data puts tremendous pressure on IT,” says Loura. “New technologies such as
the Internet of Things create a tsunami of data. Enterprises always have waves of
“The biggest benefit of Delphix for us is time, getting things done faster, in hours, instead of days or weeks. Also,
because we’re now able to test in current environments with realistic, working datasets, we’ve seen a material
improvement on quality, a reduction of risk, and a proven ability to apply new solutions to the business.”
– Ralph Loura, former CIO, Clorox
Case Study
data, but what we are experiencing today is a wave of epic proportions.” Keeping this
massive swell of data current, handling it, copying it, and moving it, was quickly becoming
the biggest challenge for the Clorox IT organization.
ŸŸ Clorox faced significant recurring storage costs for non-production databases and their
backups.
ŸŸ A conventional process for provisioning an SAP system took 45 days, impacting
Clorox’s ability to quickly respond to changes for its many brands across the globe.
ŸŸ As part of its IT modernization strategy, Clorox chose to switch service providers,
requiring the IT team to migrate its entire application estate to a new location. A typical
time needed for such migration was seven days—an unacceptably long period of
outage for the company’s core systems.
ŸŸ Clorox developers were often constrained by the availability of environments, causing
project delays.
Key Benefits
7-day core system outage
averted by replacing physical
data migration processes with
virtualized data
Hours, not weeks—the time
it takes Clorox to refresh data
for dev and test environments
8-week delay was avoided by
replacing conventional dataset
refresh during a large system
implementation with data
virtualization
ŸŸ Testers frequently used inconsistent test data, due to the time required to revert an environment to its original state, impacting the
QA teams’ ability to accurately test transactions across all interconnected systems.
Solution
Clorox partnered with Delphix to virtualize the company’s data infrastructure. Less than six weeks after deploying Delphix solutions,
Clorox was successfully provisioning virtual databases for its development and testing teams. Data virtualization solutions from
Delphix have helped accelerate time to value for Clorox, enabling IT to better position the company’s brands using both traditional
retail and digital channels across the globe, building brand awareness and strengthening consumer loyalty.
Results
By automating the process of rolling out changes to its core SAP systems without downtime, Clorox can now react quicker to
customer demands, make swift operational adjustments, and make strategy decisions in response to changing consumer behavior.
ŸŸ Delphix helped Clorox automate and streamline the process of data management, saving time and storage costs, reducing
downtime, and improving system availability.
ŸŸ By using a virtual platform, Clorox can now refresh data in a matter of hours, not weeks, improving IT agility.
ŸŸ The Clorox team used Delphix to solve their data migration challenges, moving large and very complex datasets at the heart of
their business in hours instead of days, minimizing risk and avoiding costly downtime.
ŸŸ Improving the utilization of environment resources enabled developers to start projects sooner, boosting productivity and
enabling IT to respond faster to business demands.
ŸŸ Delphix gave the Clorox IT team the ability to create bookmarks of environments and roll back to a previous state with zero
downtime. Using consistent test data that closely mimics production data across all connected systems helped QA teams deliver
better results, ultimately improving application quality.
About Delphix
Delphix enables companies—including over 30% of the Fortune 100—to complete application projects in half the time while using half the
infrastructure by delivering virtual data on demand. With integrated data delivery and data masking capabilities, Delphix software helps IT
organizations improve data security while simultaneously driving dramatic productivity increases. Delphix is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA
with offices globally. For more information, please visit delphix.com.
delphix.com
[email protected]
+1.650.494.1645
Global HQ
1400A Seaport Boulevard, Suite 200
Redwood City, CA 94063 USA
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