By keeping its IT infrastructure modern and refreshed, it reaps cost-performance benefits in customer experience, eco-sustainability and system performance

To support its maturing cloud strategy and to help ready itself for a customer experience evolution in the global women’s fashion e-commerce industry, one Melbourne-based retailer with a presence in 26 markets has refreshed its IT infrastructure.

According to the firm, ease of migration, cost of migration, cloud readiness, and future proofing were core motivations behind the infrastructure refresh.

Naresh Teckchandani, General Manager of IT, Forever New, said that infrastructure refresh was required to lay the foundations for its hybrid multi-cloud strategy where workloads are transferable between private and public clouds, promoting operational agility for a better customer experience. “Our Melbourne data center powers everything from our very own Chadstone shop floor to our stores on Singapore’s Orchard Road and London’s White City. With multiple ways for shoppers to reach us all around the world for a seamless shopping experience, backend performance is the essence of a better, more personalized customer experience,” he said.

Since completing the migration, middleware errors have gone, and the firm’s Warehouse Management System has become more accurate in real-time inventory data. Performance of the underlying infrastructure has immensely improved, extending to online application programming interfaces, payroll systems, enterprise resource planning, and product lifecycle management.

“Our e-commerce platform largely lives on AWS, while corporate workloads run on Azure. But not everything is cost effective in public cloud, so we use a combination of on-premises private cloud and public clouds. This keeps cloud costs controlled, and ensures applications run where they best fit. We have also cut power consumption by slashing our former stack of 16 nodes down to just 10, so that’s around a 40% reduction,” Teckchandani added about the Nutanix platform chosen for the refresh. 

Forever New has also seen major improvements in backup performance. Eight-hour ERP backups in the past are now completed in under an hour, and data warehouse backups that took 12 hours now take two hours.