Most retailers today stay a step or two behind when it comes to modern technology, especially on the mobile side. Sawyer Effect, LLC, a consultant for J.Crew Group, Inc., has been using Red Hat, Inc.’s open-source product Ansible, an IT automation engine, to get its customer’s mobile business up to speed and greatly improve its business.

Oscar Gonzalez, principal software engineer and founder of Sawyer Effect, sat down to talk with Brian Gracely (@bgracely), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Red Hat Summit 2016 in San Francisco, California.

The importance of a strong mobile presence

The past several years have seen an amazing boom in mobile devices and applications. This has never been more important for retailers, who in some cases are capturing up to 50 percent of their customers from the mobile side. That is why these companies must bring their mobile business quickly up to speed or risk being left behind.

“It’s very important for any retailer to improve the mobile experience to capture these users,” said Gonzalez.

What is Ansible?

Sawyer Effect uses Ansible to deploy and manage J.Crew’s mobile applications. Not only is the software powerful and fast, but it is also easy to use, which saves additional time that in the past would have been spent on manual deployment and testing, Gonzalez explained. Additionally, Ansible’s management functions allows the entire company to be on the same page when it comes to its mobile business.

“It think it’s very important that we realize this allows us to be one team,” explained Gonzalez. “This allows program managers, developers, operations and QA engineers to be able to work together and deploy one single solution.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’scoverage of the Red Hat Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE