Chico's FAS, specialty retailer of private-label, casual-to-dressy women's clothing, is garnering plenty of attention these days. After signing Debbie Phelps, mother of Olympic swimming phenom Michael Phelps, to represent its clientele, the Fort Myers, Fla.-based clothier drew more attention when First-Lady-To-Be Michelle Obama wore a design by Chico's affiliate White House | Black Market during a television appearance.

The company operates 1,083 stores bearing the Chico's, White House | Black Market and Soma Intimates banners. As its popularity grows, it is even more crucial that Chico's be able to satisfy customer demand, not only through its fashion offerings but via the technology that keeps everything moving.

Chico's depends upon Hewlett Packard to help manage its growth and operations, utilizing more than 20,000 HP devices that link to the company's headquarters. Other HP solutions the clothier uses include back office systems that support purchasing, clothing design, material sourcing, distribution and financials.

"For us, it's about the relationship we have with HP," says Steve Ross, vice president of information technology for Chico's. "HP provides us with a very high level of accessibility. If we need to try out new technology or get creative on a solution, we can get this done quickly without a lot of red tape."

HP answers requests for testing very quickly, Ross says, and provides needed expertise and equipment on premises so Chico's can start testing solutions as soon as possible. "It is really a good partnership in a number of areas, from hardware to system software, from testing to implementing the different solutions we are considering," he says. "That's on top of a good price point and a good performance point."

Integrity Superdome versatility
The HP Integrity Superdome high-end server is Chico's large box database server. Integrity Superdome can run intensive applications like Oracle and SAP and often serves as an IT consolidation platform. Chico's has tailored the big box to suit its myriad needs.

"We worked with HP to really get creative, to get the most out of this machine from both a performance and availability perspective," Ross says. "We sliced it into four different partitions: three are production, and one is a failover partition that can be used in case any of the first three have an issue. The framework is really high performing and a highly available platform for many of our main production database services."

Chico's did not remove all other equipment from its data center and convert exclusively to HP servers, Ross says, but transitioned to new applications with the technology company.

HP technology has allowed Chico's to grow system capacity by 300 percent in five years without requiring a much larger physical footprint to house it. "We're up to 500-plus servers and we've only grown the square footage in our data center by about 30 percent," Ross says. "We've been able to use current HP technology that is compact, more efficient and requires less power. Support staff requirements are less, and as a result fewer manpower maintenance hours are needed."

Chico's also is using HP's BladeSystem "to quickly provision servers for different application needs," Ross says. "Not only are they high performing and cost effective, but they take up minimal space and use power efficiently so they help contain the overall space and power requirements of the data center."

POS is battle-tested
The clothier also uses HP's point-of-sale hardware in all its stores. "There is nothing more valuable to Chico's than its customer experience," says Tate Davis, senior product manager for HP's POS solution. "They want their customers to have a good experience when they check out, and we want to make sure that the POS solution is battle-tested and works whenever their stores are open."

Chico's also handles a tremendous amount of transaction data, and uses HP Integrity to translate it into data that business decisions can be made around.

According to Davis, Chico's prefers solutions it can purchase, standardize and deploy for the longest possible time to minimize churn, in terms of supporting their thousand remote stores all over the country. After standardizing with one solution made it easier for Chico's to manage its POS, the company decided to upgrade from HP's rp5000 to the rp5700, which includes peripherals like cash drawers, scanners and thermal receipt printers. HP has deployed more than 5,000 checkout lanes with Chico's.