OFFICE Partner boosts e-commerce speed by 64% with AWS
OFFICE Partner looks to future growth
OFFICE Partner, a German office hardware company, migrated its e-commerce platform to AWS to improve its scalability and performance while also cutting costs and reinforcing security. Founded in 1997 in Gescher, Northwest Germany, the company today employs over 200 people and generates €180 million in annual turnover. Its online store uses the Shopware version 5 e-commerce platform.
Previously, OFFICE Partner had hosted Shopware and its e-commerce store using a cloud provider. But this was starting to hold the company back – it needed better performance and scalability to grow and offer customers the best possible online experience. OFFICE Partner chose to work with Skaylink to help ensure a smooth migration from its former cloud supplier to AWS.
E-commerce performance is essential for customer experience
OFFICE Partner needed better performance from its cloud provider. “We needed the website to be faster to improve the experience for both customers and internal users,” says Thomas Eiling, Head of E-Commerce at OFFICE Partner. “Loading times were just too long, and sometimes the site was simply unresponsive.” Access to the main Shopware database was also too slow, further contributing to suboptimal overall performance that directly impacted OFFICE Partner’s online customers.
In addition, the business needed greater scalability. Adding new capacity to the previous cloud provider’s solution was difficult and time-consuming, and rolling out new features took too long. OFFICE Partner wanted to scale capacity up and down as needed and get new features to market faster. “We’re expanding fast,” says Eiling. “We needed to add new employees and new locations, as well as new features, to our website. The previous solution made this too difficult, and we lacked control. We needed a new platform that could help us scale.”
In January 2021, OFFICE Partner asked Skaylink to help it transform its e-commerce operations on AWS. Eiling had worked with Skaylink and AWS at previous roles, so after assessing the market and weighing its options, OFFICE Partner decided to migrate to AWS with Skaylink’s support.
“We have made significant improvements in performance and service at the same cost.”
OFFICE Partner sees 64% performance improvements and lower costs
After 6 weeks of preparation the migration was completed in just one day. The key outcome for OFFICE Partner is that it has confidence in its new technical platform and in its ability to adapt to future market movements. Using AWS, it has a solid technical infrastructure that can support its future growth and expansion, whether it needs to add new branches or improve its e-commerce performance and user experience.
Skaylink gives the company ongoing managed services and professional services, delivering 24/7 support and monitoring to help OFFICE Partner maximize uptime for its online store. In the event of an issue, Skaylink’s experts will respond within 1 hour – 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. “We want to give OFFICE Partner the reassurance that its business-critical e-commerce website will be reliable and stable, so we’re delivering round-the-clock support,” says Steffen Drya, Head of Managed Cloud Services at Skaylink.
The new Skaylink and AWS solution has already delivered a 64 percent speed improvement over the previous solution. The platform’s database performance –expressed as “time-to-first-byte” – is down from 2.8 seconds to less than 1 second. This means all aspects of the e-commerce experience are faster, from customers buying products to OFFICE Partner employees making changes in the backend. Changing prices across the site used to take 14–15 hours, now it only takes 2 hours.
Greater scalability using Amazon EC2 and AWS Serverless
OFFICE Partner now has the flexibility to change features and services at speed, using microservices enabled by the database functionality of Amazon Aurora, which offers unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Using Amazon Aurora has allowed the company to add new features with ease and improve the customer experience. The additional scalability is in part due to the use of Amazon Aurora, with its powerful features, such as master read/write splitting and spot instances. “Our previous hosting provider simply didn’t offer these performance-enhancing options,” says Eiling.
Improving performance previously could take months, now it’s a matter of weeks. OFFICE Partner also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and AWS Fargate, serverless compute for containers, to provide greater scalability and speed. “The scalability of Amazon EC2 lets us set up containers with ease and deploy and manage services so quickly that it means we can add new features whenever we want,” says Roman Herbstmann, Head of Connected Services at OFFICE Partner. “We use AWS Fargate serverless technology to scale our services as we need. For example, we can now update stock levels every 15 minutes, giving users a smoother experience online. If a customer is searching the site for a laptop only to discover it is out of stock, that’s a frustrating user experience – but now it is much less likely to happen.”
In addition, Amazon Aurora has helped with troubleshooting across OFFICE Partner’s e-commerce platform. Amazon Aurora’s exportable query logs mean the company’s technical team can find and identify faults much more quickly. Shopping cart performance has also improved. “We’ve had direct feedback from our customers telling us that the ecommerce experience is faster and smoother,” says Eiling. “It doesn’t get any better than your own customers telling you they love the service.”
Stronger security using AWS WAF and data encryption
OFFICE Partner has strengthened its security by adding AWS WAF to protect its web applications from common exploits. “AWS WAF is easy to deploy, protects our network, and offers good value for money too,” says Eiling. “The service protects us against suspicious web requests and traffic.”
Data security is also improved, with Skaylink adding encryption to OFFICE Partner’s data. “If our data was ever to be stolen, it would be useless to the hacker as it’s fully encrypted,” says Eiling.
Lower costs as well as better performance
Amazon EC2’s autoscaling feature has helped OFFICE Partner save at least $1,000 a month on hosting. Autoscaling means OFFICE Partner only pays for the resources they use. As a direct result, costs for cloud hosting are down 15 percent, largely thanks to Skaylink and AWS technology.
The migration process was smooth and simple, giving OFFICE Partner the foundation it needs to expand its digital estate.
"We’re proud of the project and the platform it’s given us for the future. I’ve been involved in many migration projects, but this was the smoothest I’ve ever seen. We did it in just one night – a month earlier than planned. Skaylink have been exceptional in their service delivery. I would rate them very highly. They have been a great technical partner for OFFICE Partner.”
Solutions & Benefits
AWS services used
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon Aurora
- AWS Fargate
- AWS WAF
Benefits
- 64% improvement in performance
- 15% reduction in costs
- Faster, smoother user experience
- Stronger security with in-built encryption
- Scalable platform for future growth
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