The trends driving the e-commerce industry forward also put a lot of pressure on the underlying infrastructure. The critical question is: Can your e-commerce platform keep up?Rapid E-Commerce Growth – In 2012, online sales on Black Friday topped $1 billion for the first time ever, a 26% increase over 2011. By 2016, E-commerce sales are projected to grow 45% (Forrester)…. So your e-commerce platform must have the scalability to keep pace with aggressive growth, but keep costs in check.HigherConsumer Expectations – Today’s consumers want an ever-faster, more personalized e-commerce experience. Website performance is critical. 72% of US online shoppers will abandon slow sites for competitors…. So your e-commerce platform must have the speed and stability to meet consumers’ expectations for website responsiveness and availability.Shifts in Shopping Behavior – Mobile devices, social media, and online review sites are transforming how consumers shop. With competitors just a click away, e-commerce companies must innovate to stay relevant and meet new consumer demands…. So your e-commerce platform must be able to meet new requirements set by the business, whether that’s to support mobile shopping, real-time personalization, or other site enhancement.Huge Opportunity for Big Data – The rise in mobile, digital, social media, and location-based technologies has resulted in a huge increase in e-commerce data. Retailers using Big Data can increase their operating margin by 60% (McKinsey)…. So your e-commerce platform must be able to manage and monetize a huge volume and variety of e-commerce data.Sources:Forrester:45% increase in online sales by 2016http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/02/27/e-retail-spending-increase-45-20161&1:72% of shoppers will abandon slow sitehttp://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/11-study-shows-72-percent-of-us-online-shoppers-will-abandon-slow-sites-for-competitorseDigital Research: 64% of smartphone owners shop onlinehttp://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33328/21-Internet-Marketing-Stats-That-Will-Blow-Your-Mind.aspxMcKinsey Global Institute: 60% increase in operating marginBig data: The Next frontier for innovation, competition and productivityhttp://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation
In-Memory Technologies can help e-commerce companies keep pace.Over last several decades there has been a huge drop in memory prices and massive increase in the size of commodity serversIt’s time to ditch the disk… to stop locking data away in slow, disk-bound databases which are expensive and difficult to runInstead, you can store data in memory, right where the application runs for ultra-fast access (at least 100x faster)
When it comes to in-memory data management, Terracotta’s BigMemory is a major break through. Let’s quickly look at the architecture behind Big MemoryBigMemory lets you store massive amounts of data in memory – for example, you can store your entire product catalog or millions of customer recordsWhat’s key: Can store massive amounts of data in memory without triggering Java Garbage Collection pauses. This means you can maximize memory use per server/JVM while achieving microsecond access times to all of your data all of the time.The important thing here is predictability ->BigMemory scales up and out, providing predictable, low latency data access to terabytes of data across a distributed application
In-Memory data management offers huge advantages for e-commerce sites. Let’s look at 5 ways BigMemory can improve e-commerce performance for a superior customer experience at any scale.ChallengeSlow Web Response TimeE-commerce sites generally have tight SLAs for Web response time (and many of our customers come to us because they are not consistently hitting them)High customer expectations for site speed (and 72% will leave for a competitor’s site when they become impatient)Sluggish site = Abandoned shopping carts and Lost saleWith BigMemory100x Faster Access to Data that’s stored in memory right where the application is; this is predictable, low latencyImprove Web responsiveness and site speedConsistently meet SLAsKeep customers satisfied—and shoppingon your site
ChallengeE-Commerce Growth PainsSpikes in traffic due to promotions and seasonal variations (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday)Continued growth in e-commerce transactions (45% growth projected through 2016)Your company’s own growth targetsWith BigMemoryUnlimited Scalability takes the guesswork out of growthScale to millions of site visitors, 10,000s of transactions per second (TPS), and TBs of dataReadily handle spikes in traffic and growing transaction volumesPerformance at any scale
ChallengeReliance on Back-end ServicesE-Commerce sites typically rely on multiple back-end services (DBs, search engines, CRM systemsetc.) that often do double-duty serving other parts of the business and may lack the capacity to support rising/variable e-commerce trafficWhen loads exceed the capabilities of the DB/service there can be timeouts and slowdownsThis jeopardizes the performance of the DB/services and the e-commerce site itself.. Frustrating usersWith BigMemoryDe-Couple the E-Commerce site from back-end services/DBs for greater stabilityOffload back-end services / DBsDe-coupling Web app and database protects performance of eachEliminate capacity bottlenecks, timeouts and slowdownsBigMemory also has enterprise-class features that deliver 5 9s availability include fault-tolerance and fast restartability after maintenance
ChallengeE-Commerce Platform CostsE-commerce deployments commonly have dozens, if not hundreds of web application servers (JVMs). This server proliferation adds operational costs and complexityReliance on expensive databases / mainframes can mean escalating costs as e-commerce demand growsWith BigMemoryCost-Efficient Ops and GrowthStore 100s of GBs of data in memory per JVM (without causing Java Garbage Collection pauses)Reduce server counts by up to 90% (server consolidation)Maximize use of inexpensive RAM Avoid investments in expensive IT resources (DB licenses, MF MIPS)
ChallengeMeet New Business RequirementsEcommerce world is a huge state of change with escalating customer expectations (e.g., for fast access from tablets or for personalized content)Business will request new features designed to improve the customer experience and increase sales (i.e., better support mobile users)Marketing will run promotions designed to increase sales that may tax the capabilities of e-commerce infrastructureWith BigMemoryInnovations that Increase SalesLeverage real-time access to Big Data for new online shopping features; for example, take advantage of real-time personalization to increase conversion rates and customer spendReadily accommodate demand for new services Know that your site can readily handle increased traffic loads due to marketing promotionsPlus, with the performance improvements you increase customer satisfaction which increases loyalty and sales
Leading e-commerce sites are sold on BigMemory. Our in-memory data management solution powers some of the world’s most popular, highly trafficked e-commerce sites.1,000s of products - everything from athletic gear to online travel100,000s of registered users Millions of daily visitors Billions in annual revenue Common e-commerce use cases include:E-Commerce Website Performance Guarantee a superior experience for online shoppers at any scale. Readily handle spikes in traffic and growing transaction volumes while meeting customers’ expectations for speed and availability. Consistently meet internal performance SLAs.Web Server ConsolidationSlash operational costs and complexity by eliminating the dozens of Web servers commonly found in e-commerce deployments. Store hundreds of gigabytes of data in memory, in a single JVM, and reduce server counts by up to 90%.Real-Time Personalization Increase customer spend and loyalty by using BigMemory to display customized content instantly. Convert browsers into buyers with real-time couponing, and encourage repeat sales with targeted promotions and product recommendations. Real-Time Fraud Detection Give your bottom line a boost with faster, more accurate fraud detection. Run complex algorithms based on thousands of fraud detection rules—without causing the delays that lead to system timeouts or abandoned shopping carts.
ChallengeA Fortune 150 seller of athletic footwear and apparel and one of the most recognizable brands on the planet was experiencing substantially increased revenue from its e-commerce site which features nearly 7,500 products. With e-commerce sales topping $340 million, the company needed to ensure that it could support continued growth without overloading core backend systems. Product data requests were taxing its search engine, as well as impacting search and page load times for online shoppers. The company wanted to continue delivering a high-performing site without further scaling out its backend services.Like many e-commerce sites, the online store of this particular global brand pulls data from various sources, including disk-bound databases, various web services, and a search engine.As transaction volumes have grown, so has the load on these services. Large spikes in traffic—due to promotions, product releases, or events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday—jeopardized the stability of these backend services and, ultimately, the performance of the e-commerce website. SolutionThe athletic company decided to protect itself from traffic spikes with in-memory data management that would also make product information, customer reviews, and search results instantly available. The company opted for a highly available BigMemory Max deployment with a 96GB in-memory data engine. The installation included a local 1GB BigMemory store on each of 32 web application servers and a shared 64GB BigMemory store distributed across four commodity machines, with BigMemory ensuring data consistency across the array.
ValueSince going live, BigMemory has reduced overall load on the company’s backend services by 40%. A whopping 90% of product data requests are served directly and instantly by BigMemory; only 50% of search requests hit its search engine. As an added benefit, BigMemory has improved the experience for online shoppers, with ultra-fast data access cutting average page load time by 16% and reducing search time by 30%. As an added benefit, BigMemory has improved the experience for online shoppers. The ultra-fast data access has resulted in page load and search times which have exceeded the customer’s expectations.BigMemorynot only helps the company avoid the expense of scaling out backend servers, but also protects the performance of systems that do double-duty supporting the business outside the website. Thanks to BigMemory, this major athletic footwear and apparel provider is well positioned to keep e-commerce sales running higher and higher.
What They Were After: Build loyalty and sales from millions of daily website visitorsEvery day, the shipper’s website handles more than 32 million tracking requests. For the world’s largest package delivery company, this huge volume of traffic provides a big business opportunity. This leader in logistics, looks to increase customer satisfaction and sales by serving up locally relevant content to users logged into its site. Just to give you an idea, the website can alert customers to local weather or service delays and can display market-specific discounts and product offers – alldesigned to boost revenue. The Big Challenge: Failing to meet performance SLAs for serving market-specific content The company’s challenge was being able to present locally relevant information to a global user base at speeds fast enough to meet strict performance standards. Matching content to customer required time-consuming calls to multiple databases. The database calls would look up information like account location and history. As a result, data retrieval times were at least four times slower than the service-level agreement in place. Not only was the shipper falling short of its SLAs, the company also risked upsetting customers with a subpar online experience. Why BigMemory: Head-to-head tests reveal superior performance and ease of use The shipper conducted a rigorous evaluation of three alternatives for improving SLA performance: Terracotta BigMemory, IBM eXtreme Scale, and Oracle Coherence.The Terracotta solution stood out immediately for its ease of use. The shipper breezed through the proof of concept implementation for BigMemory in just a few hours, while competing products required days, even weeks, to set up.Even more impressive was BigMemory’s superior, unmatched speed in head-to-head performance tests. The shipper went live with 30GB of BigMemory in late 2011, which allowed them to store a rolling 90 days of customer data in memory.
The Big Results: SLAs consistently met and BigMemory adopted as the corporate standard for in-memory data management By moving customer data into BigMemory, this company slashed the time to serve market-specific content from 900 milliseconds to 120 milliseconds, a dramatic 85% acceleration. The faster speed has allowed the company to consistently exceed performance SLAs and present locally relevant offers and alerts without jeopardizing the customer experience. In fact, the performance gains have been so substantial and reliable that the shipper has adopted BigMemory as the corporate standard for in-memory data management. The IT enterprise architecture team is now educating other IT groups about their success and encouraging the use of BigMemory with more applications.
BigMemory provides an all-round boost to e-commerce performance. Your site will perform better, and so will your business.Speed - Accelerate data access times by 100x or more for faster page loads, speedier searches, and quicker checkoutsScalability - Keep pace with aggressive growth by scaling effortlessly to millions of users, tens of thousands of transactions per second, and terabytes of data. StabilityProtect the performance of your e-commerce site by de-coupling it from back-end systems that often do double-duty meeting e-commerce and other business demandsCost-Efficiency Slash operational expenses by consolidating Web servers and reducing the application footprint. Save millions in infrastructure costs by moving away from costly databases and mainframes.Revenue Growth Increase customer satisfaction with a richer, faster e-commerce experience. Take advantage of real-time personalization and other innovations to boost sales. Conclusion statement.