vidaXL powers growth with move to Google Cloud and CTS Managed Services
vidaXL recognised that CTS could meet their requirements for a specialist Google Cloud partner, read on for the great outcome.
vidaXL is one of the fastest-growing online brands in the world, operating in 29 markets including North America, Australia and Europe. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in the Netherlands, they now employ more than 2000 people in offices and warehouses around the world, continuously expanding their offering to include more product groups, reach new channels and new markets.
vidaXL found their on-premises data centre was preventing them from growing at the rate required to keep pace with demand. Hardware took too long to procure & provision and, with no automation, consistency became another problem. The existing platform could not scale and experienced downtime.
vidaXL had a concrete set of business requirements they needed to meet for success:
vidaXL analysed the top cloud providers and quickly recognised the capability that Google Cloud offered them as a fast growing global business. vidaXL recognised that CTS could meet their requirements for a specialist Google Cloud partner.
Ted van Dongen, CIO at vidaXL, explained “CTS is a dedicated and certified Google Premier partner. They have a mountain of expertise and experience we were looking for. The introductory meeting was enough to convince us. We saw that as a business partner they think along with our development and ambitions and have a can-do mentality. CTS was and is clearly the right partner to realise our infrastructure modernisation vision.”
Utilising our Google Cloud and migration expertise CTS has enabled vidaXL to make the most of Google Cloud from day 1 of the relationship. Our collaborative approach has enabled a quick and smooth data centre exit to Google Cloud Platform while upskilling the internal vidaXL teams on Google Cloud in the process.
CTS has built a leading infrastructure platform focussed on Kubernetes using the technologies from the DevOps ecosystem. vidaXL now has the ability to roll out development environments that match production. Testing new features, infrastructure or software, comes with confidence via state of the art CI / CD pipelines. The CTS infrastructure as code methodology provides a disaster recovery capability that most organisations can only dream of: recovery measured in minutes. And most importantly, the platform will dynamically autoscale and recover from failure, at a moment’s notice, meeting all of vidaXL’s needs.
vidaXL has made significant operating cost savings due to the ability to scale up and down based on demand. The production environment scales back through the quieter hours and non-production environments are terminated outside of business hours while not in use.
Autoscaling means vidaXL can scale based on the number of active customers and adapt to failure if they happen in an automated fashion. Scale fluctuates across the environment:
This has allowed vidaXL to move away from performance issues during peak trading and to automated recovery with no downtime if a failure occurs. The platform can serve more customers concurrently which increases profits while customer experience has improved significantly. This is a result of the collaboration between vidaXL and CTS.
Ted added: “This is really supporting our flexibility and growth in a way that aligns with our long-term strategy.”
CTS’ managed services offering allows vidaXL to continually maximise their investment in Google Cloud. In addition, the partnership allows the internal vidaXL team to focus on adding value to the business and driving their own growth, while CTS provides the underlying infrastructure and GCP services to match this ambition.
Ted Van Dongen concludes that “We have practically no worries about our infrastructure; we can confidently leave that to the experts at CTS. That way we can fully concentrate on what is really important to us: growth. Together we form a powerful team.”
“Partnering with CTS allows us to focus on what’s really important to us: growth. It allows us to focus on strategic tasks that will continue taking our business forward, while our partners help us manage our underlying infrastructure.”
Ted van Dongen, CIO
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