Metcash delivers better online experiences to double the customers

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Metcash’s Convenience division provides a ‘one wholesale solution’ for more than 90,000 customers nationwide including; forecourt retail, convenience businesses, small coffee shops, fresh food outlets and restaurants.  Within days of the global situation affecting the Australian public, traffic on the Metcash Campbells website grew exponentially.

“Our site almost fell over, we contacted Ultra Commerce and within 30 minutes they had our site scaled and stable.”
-David Williams, GM Solution Delivery Metcash

Thanks to a fast-acting response from Ultra Commerce, the Campbells website was scaled with additional capacity and immediately stabilized.  The Campbells website continues to experience high activity, while the page load time has decreased significantly.

“We really appreciated your support on this one – under crisis you were there immediately and solved the challenges quickly.”

Below is the graph demonstrating a significantly high page load time prior to extra capacity allocated.

Below is a graph demonstrating the immediate decreased page load response times after extra capacity allocated.

Metcash’s Campbells website has benefited significantly as a result of the Ultra Commerce BYOL solution.

Learn more about Ultra Commerce BYOL or Speak with Us to talk about your digital commerce challenges.

Razer eliminates downtime, increases performance, and improves customer experience

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Overview

Established in 2005, Razer is one of the most recognized ecosystems for gaming hardware and software across the globe. Razer is for gamers, by gamers.

Experiencing astronomical growth in a short period of time due to its award-winning hardware and software that supports 60M users, Razer knew the need for a scalable and high performing digital commerce solution.

 

Challenge

Facing several vital user experience issues and lost revenue due to site downtime, Razer came to Ultra Commerce to take advantage of their expertise in SAP Hybris and AWS.

As one of the world’s largest online stores for gamers, Razer frequently has large promotional events, new product releases, and gaming events that require a highly scalable platform to service large user volumes. An additional complication related to the overall stability and performance of the site was frequent DDoS attacks.

These capabilities were so vital to Razer’s business that a key requirement for Ultra Commerce’s Proof of Concept (PoC) engagement for Razer was to demonstrate SmartStack’s ability to handle scale during both scheduled and unscheduled peaks.

Razer is a highly innovative organization with rapidly evolving products and technology, requiring frequent updates to their product catalog and offerings. Traditionally this resulted in a 3-4 hour outage each month while Razer executed the SAP Hybris System Update task. These down for maintenance windows created a significant challenge since each update rendered the site unable to transact business, resulting in a negative impact on revenues and customer satisfaction.

Razer needed an SAP Hybris solution that would address current challenges while supporting future growth. To begin a new, more effective solution, Razer required assistance to migrate their digital commerce infrastructure as quickly and with as little disruption to the business as possible.

 

Solution

In under 50 days (April 25, 2018, to June 13, 2018), Ultra Commerce migrated Razer’s digital commerce infrastructure including a database re-platform to AWS Aurora Database (which comes standard with SmartStack) leveraging the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and Database Migration Service.

Once the migration was complete, Ultra Commerce utilized their platform on AWS to provide a guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99% uptime. SmartStack, built to AWS Well Architected specifications, provided much needed stability, scalability and performance improvements in line with Razer’s workload dynamics.

Continuing to make the most of AWS offerings, Ultra Commerce utilized AWS Elasticache with Memcached and SmartStack to deliver session persistence. In the unlikely event of infrastructure failure, SmartStack ensures Razer’s customers won’t experience any session-related issues, such as their cart being destroyed, or being forcefully logged out.

Ultra Commerce also utilized the SAP Hybris Rolling Update process to perform zero-downtime updates during Razer’s frequent upgrades. Rolling Updates work by cloning the original SAP Hybris typesystem, redirecting the user to the original version while code updates run in parallel on the cloned version, leaving no interference to the end user (see graphic below). As demonstrated in the graphic below, an example of a System Update that requires new code could be a new payment method, such as cash card acceptance, or a new attribute to a pre-existing product, such as a mouse’s logo.

Outcome

To date with Ultra Commerce, Razer has experienced minimal downtime with no breach to the 99.99% availability agreement since go-live. Deployments now take less than 30 minutes with no downtime instead of the original 3+ hours with downtime. The ability to keep the site updated with the latest and greatest products and offers while processing orders at any time of the day has increased Razer’s ability to be competitive and differentiated in the marketplace as a true global 24/7/365 business.

“We can now execute site maintenance without incurring any downtime. This is a big deal!”
– Patricia Liu, Chief of Staff, Razer

Razer now enjoys a higher performing and scalable solution with greater availability for their online store with the help of Ultra Commerce powered by AWS to deliver the SAP Hybris application. This has allowed Razer to make the most of their digital commerce investment and give their customers the experience they expect from the world leader gamer brand.

General Pants reaches new global customers and business expansion

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Overview

General Pants (GP) is a leading Australian fashion retailer operating with over 50 physical stores across Australia, and online in multiple countries worldwide, covering USA, Canada, UK, Japan, Europe, Asia, Australia/New Zealand, and more.

 

Challenge

GP were long-time SAP Hybris users, deployed on traditional physical infrastructure, on-premise in Data Centers hosted in Sydney. As part of a move to expand their online offering to other countries outside of Australia, GP looked to the cloud to add flexibility and resiliency to their infrastructure.

To support their expansion, GP needed to find the right partner to provide a platform for SAP Hybris to scale for anticipated surges in traffic (including sales promotions and holiday periods), add extra resiliency, and take full advantage of cloud technologies. GP was also going through a period of change and open to redesign with all elements of their infrastructure being under review.

Deployments of new code resulted in scheduled downtime to the GP site, located only in Australia. Fortunately for GP, this didn’t cause a huge impact to revenue since these deployments were done outside of Australian business hours. However, as GP looked forward to global expansion, they needed a new solution for updates that would minimize downtime at all times, decreasing disruption to customers.

Scalability is critical for any e-commerce business, and this was especially true for GP. While GP’s infrastructure allowed them scaling to handle anticipated surges in traffic (pre-planned sales, etc.), their target demographic meant that ad-hoc, instant surges in traffic (typically driven by social media) happened occasionally and by surprise. Their existing on-premise infrastructure setup meant that quickly scaling to handle the sudden surge of traffic was sometimes too slow to react, leading to issues with the website including poor user experience and inability to transact business.

 

Solution

GP came to Ultra Commerce and took advantage of their Platform as a Service (Ultra Commerce BYOL), professional services, and expertise with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Thanks to Ultra Commerce, GP was able to make the most of a number of AWS services. First, to address the restrictions of on-premise infrastructure hosting, Ultra Commerce used AWS Database Migration Service to migrate GP site from MSSQL to Aurora with AWS Schema Conversion Tool. This combination ensured a smooth transfer to the AWS Cloud with little to no interruption to daily business.

Ultra Commerce also used AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), and AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) to make an easier setup, operate, secure, scalable, available, and a high performing environment for GP in the AWS Cloud. Continuing to increase performance of the GP digital commerce solution, Ultra Commerce implemented AWS CloudFront, creating a better user experience for customers globally.

To address GP’s need for high global availability at scale, Ultra Commerce utilizes AWS EC2 Instances to perform code deployments in such a way that reduce the duration and frequency of downtime windows when deploying new code. Ultra Commerce also allows for 24/7 code deployments, even in Production, meaning GP can perform deployments at a time that suits them.

Additionally, Ultra Commerce takes advantage of the ease of scalability that AWS offers which allows GP to quickly add additional resources during unexpected peak times. This differs from their previous hosting situation where new physical infrastructure needed to be purchased well in advance.

 

Outcome

Once commencing their relationship with Ultra Commerce, GP noticed an improvement in site performance, availability, and scalability – at a reduced cost, thanks to the smooth migration to the AWS Cloud.

Attaining their expansion goals, GP expanded to over 8 regions of online stores globally, transacting business 24/7/365. Ultra Commerce has eliminated downtime for code deployments, allowing GP to stay online at all times to be competitive in their market.

Without fear of their site slowing down or going offline due to unexpected high user loads, GP comfortable executes large scale sales and marketing campaigns. Ultra Commerce’s ability to quickly react to GP load requirements in the AWS Cloud has kept the online stores highly available with their guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.999% uptime.

GP now delivers increased customer experiences with their new digital commerce solution to more customers globally. Ultra Commerce has proved a successful partner in supporting GP goals for global customer growth and business expansion, running millions in revenue through Ultra Commerce in the AWS Cloud.

Assisting Novartis to create best in class customer experience while streamlining internal processes

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Overview 

Novartis is one of the world’s largest international pharmaceutical companies supporting multiple divisions in medicine, millions of products, and over 200 innovative projects.

In 2015, Novartis launched an ambitious Hybris eCommerce program for its Surgical Eye Care division, with the dual objectives of delivering a best in class customer experience, while streamlining internal processes to reduce manual work.

Challenge 

Under the original platform solution Novartis experienced a 3 to 4 week platform build lead time, delaying the release of important application features and stability improvements. Also, the solution did not satisfy strict security requirements for the pharmaceutical industry. The outcome of these business critical issues was the launch RFP and the section of the UltraServe SmartSack solution.

Solution 

In three months, from July to September 2016, UltraServe used its Platform as a Service (PaaS), SmartStack, with SAP Commerce Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch Novartis’s digital commerce solution. SmartStack offered Novartis the scalability they needed at scale and matched industry required security requirements.

“Clearly experts with Hybris technology and AWS, customer focused and great to work with, the UltraServe team brought much needed stability to the platform.”
– Robin Shah, Head of IT, EMEA Region / Global Head of eCommerce solutions

As Novartis ramped up volumes on SmartStack, UltraServe worked closely with the internal teams providing the necessary environments and expertise to address performance bottlenecks, perform system upgrades and deliver additional capabilities through the regular sprint cycles.

Outcome 

Novartis now has a stable and performant enterprise grade digital commerce solution that meets a strict regulatory framework with the convince of continued integration and continuous deployment capabilities.

“UltraServe met our stringent security standards, and quickly became a trusted partner for our IT and business teams.”
– Robin Shah, Head of IT, EMEA Region / Global Head of eCommerce solutions

The digital commerce program has been a success story for Novartis with over 100% year on year growth equating to circa $300m of business going through the platform in 2018.

Contact an UltraServe Hybris expert today to talk in confidence about how we can help you.

sales@ultraserve.com.au

Delivering next-gen digital commerce platforms for DuluxGroup

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Overview

DuluxGroup is a leading marketer and manufacturer of premium branded products that enhance, protect and maintain the places and spaces in which people live and work.

In addition to having a proud heritage, the business is maturing to meet an exciting future. UltraServe is helping them do that head on, with a suite of integrated platform services that can offer the scalability, responsivity and reliability to meet their ambitions.

“You’re going to experience major challenges on any e-commerce project of this scale, and if your partner isn’t experienced with projects of the same technology, scale and complexity, you can expect those problems to multiply. UltraServe demonstrated that they had not only delivered similar projects to ours but were also a thought leader in how these projects should be managed.”

Dafydd Lewis, Technical Lead, DuluxGroup

Problem 

Months of discovery, analysis and planning went in to defining DuluxGroup’s digital transformation strategy. The result was a multimillion-dollar commitment to delivering a single, group-wide marketing and e-commerce platform that encompassed mobile push, point of sale and analytics.

The solution had to be fully centralised while remaining scalable across multiple geographies, businesses and audiences. At every stage, user experience and best practice were to be championed. That meant reliability – and experience – were of paramount importance when it came to selecting a partner to ensure the smooth deployment and implementation of the chosen SAP Hybris, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platforms. Which made UltraServe the natural choice.

“UltraServe came highly recommended by both our digital marketing agency and SAP themselves. They had the most Hybris experience by a significant margin, and also had experience with Adobe AEM and Campaign.”

Solution

As with any large-scale, multi-market e-commerce solution, deployment, hosting and management was never going to be straightforward. However, the DuluxGroup team recognised the need for expert support early in the process.

“Hosting is often deceptively simple. It’s seen as a commodity to purchase, but it needs expertise to launch successfully without racking up technical debt. With such a large, complex and evolving project, we didn’t know exactly what would be needed when we started. UltraServe had that experience.”

By getting involved sooner, the DuluxGroup team – led by Dafydd Lewis – was able to mitigate against risk at launch and beyond. In addition to hosting, UltraServe managed deployment and patching while automating as many processes as possible. By removing human intervention, UltraServe greatly reduced the potential for error.

“UltraServe took the uncertainty out of hosting solutions. And they did so in a way that flexed to accommodate the fluid nature of the project. They were hugely responsive and went above and beyond to meet all our support needs.

With UltraServe’s instantly scalable services in place, DuluxGroup can be confident that their platforms are ready for whatever the future brings, be that international growth or e-commerce expansion.

Outcome

  • The deployment of an integrated platform to ultimately support 60+ e-commerce and content sites
  • Integrated management and analytics spanning multiple geographies
  • Instantly scalable, completely recoverable platforms
  • Recouped opportunity cost by decreasing the need for post-implementation support.

Contact an UltraServe Hybris expert today to talk in confidence about how we can help you.

sales@ultraserve.com.au