Successful Irish e-commerce company MicksGarage.com needed a cloud partner it could depend on to support its ambitious plans for expansion across Europe. With more than 6.5 million product listings on offer and customers always needing spare parts urgently, the business is heavily dependent on its IT infrastructure to manage the complex logistics operation.
Click on the image to watch the video
Having worked with the award-winning e-commerce business from its beginnings in 2003, MicksGarage.com chose Sungard AS to provide the resilient, multi-tenant cloud solution that would give it the high availability, accessibility and scalability the company needs.
The company has recently opened a distribution centre in Krakow, Poland to service the flourishing Eastern European market, and a Liverpool site is scheduled to open in 2016 to support next day deliveries to the UK.
As a business that ships over 18,000 car parts and accessories to more than 100 countries every month, it is no exaggeration when co-founder and Operations Director Michael Crean states, “Downtime would simply be disastrous – we would lose customers, revenue and future business.”
With the company’s expansion plans resulting in frequent travel, the ability to access systems remotely from anywhere in the world was also vital.
After carefully considering the customer’s needs, we recommended a highly available load balanced multi-tenant cloud solution, as well as a redundant physical server, to ensure there is no single point of failure. This gives MicksGarage.com the capability to handle sudden spikes in demand, which with its first TV advertising campaign imminent, Michael Crean finds hugely reassuring.
“Availability is absolutely critical to us. If a customer finds the website down they may never come back. Being down for even a minute would cost us hundreds of euros – an hour would run to thousands – and that’s without the knock to our reputation. We needed a partner who absolutely guarantees us uptime and the level of availability we enjoy is outstanding.”
The set-up is supported by 24-hour proactive availability monitoring of the infrastructure platform with client-defined thresholds and Managed Operating System Patch Management.