Waitrose has chosen Precise to maintain the performance and availability of its ecommerce IT infrastructure.
The decision to use Precise followed a strategic IT planning exercise that revealed the retailer would need to increase server capacity by 30-40% to meet expected increased customer demand. That increase has since been revised upwards following the decision to make the Waitrose Deliver service free for most orders, meaning the site now receives larger numbers of visitors all year round.
By using Precise to pinpoint areas for performance improvement, instead of completely replacing its existing IT assets, Waitrose aims to be able to achieve better transaction throughput without massive cost increases.
“Our challenge was to increase performance by 35 per cent to handle the level of increased customer visits,” explains Bharat Chavda, Waitrose’s IT project leader. “By using Precise TPM, we were able to drastically improve performance without a commensurate increase in our costs. Precise will play a key role in helping us to stay ahead of demand.”
The Waitrose team targeted the under-performing SQL statements in its IBM-based ecommerce system and used Precise to find ways to reduce the amount of processing power needed. Waitrose also used Precise’s Performance Management Database (PMDB) to help with capacity planning.
