Growing a family business into a two billion dollar company requires acumen, agility and 
the ability to manage change.  Lutz, Europe’s largest home furnishings retailer 
headquartered in Linz, Austria, delivers more than three thousand orders every day.  

Lutz strives to improve its reputation for exceptional customer service as it continues to 
expand with new stores and acquisitions.

To compete successfully in the face of rapid growth, Lutz relies on HP OpenVMS, which 
enables them to flexibly adapt to new business requirements and address the demands of 
a constantly evolving market.

Johann Stiglbrunner, Head of OpenVMS department, Lutz: “We have been using 
OpenVMS since 1989, when we had 200 users and eleven stores.  Today Lutz has 5,000 
users and 118 stores, and in two years we expect to grow to 9,000 users.  We run our 
payroll, accounting, purchasing and inventory control system on OpenVMS, which 
deliver the scalability we need to grow our business.  We’ve upgraded our hardware 
several times over the past 15 years and have never experienced any unplanned 
downtime”.   

OpenVMS AlphaServer clusters with Fibre-channel interconnects enable Lutz to support 
multiple business processes, empowering each Lutz store to respond efficiently and 
effectively to all of its customers.  

Sales associates can instantly inform customers of delivery time and stock availability 
from an inventory of four hundred thousand individual bar-coded items readily available 
in Lutz stores and their fully automated warehouses.  By standardizing and integrating on 
OpenVMS systems, Lutz minimizes risk while reducing expenses.

Johann Stiglbrunner: “Lutz completely depends on our OpenVMS systems—if they were 
to go down for just an hour, it would cost us at least 500,000 euros.  But the scalability, 
reliability and availability of OpenVMS has been perfect—it’s never let us down.  And 
each new version of OpenVMS delivers faster performance, enabling Lutz to reduce 
costs as we grow.  With our recent upgrade, we significantly increased performance 
without purchasing new hardware”. 

To maximize its return on IT investment, Lutz is consolidating its OpenVMS 
environment with two HP AlphaServer GS1280 systems.
 
Johann Stiglbrunner:  “By consolidating our OpenVMS systems, we will not only reduce 
administrative costs, but we will also be positioned to scale up, as Lutz adds thousands of 
users each year.  We also plan to add HP Integrity servers in a few years and are 
delighted that HP has designed Integrity servers to integrate seamlessly with AlphaServer 
clusters.   We have a very close relationship with HP, and that relationship is critical to 
our success as we continue to grow our business”. 

HP solutions help Lutz take advantage of new opportunities and expand with agility.  
With the flexibility to adapt to change and scale for growth, Lutz has become an industry 
leader, poised for a very successful future.