Global fashion retailer accelerates hybrid multicloud strategy and fine-tunes performance, for its customer-first experience
Overview
Forever New needed to replace its ageing infrastructure and modernize its technology ecosystem to support its expansive global business. The Australian retailer used an IT infrastructure that optimized system performance and made management simple. With Nutanix, the company was able to future proof its technology investments and make sales across multiple sales touchpoints run like clockwork, giving customers the kind of service, they would expect from a leading retailer.
Key Results
Ensures multicloud strategy success
High performance across all business systems protects strategy to deliver excellent service across all physical and digital touchpoints.
Delivers “one-click” hybrid cloud strategy
IT distributes workloads across private and public clouds easily, finding the most cost-effective location for each one.
Makes Citrix log-in times 75% faster
Personnel worldwide report better log-in times, allowing them to work more efficiently.
Nutanix gives us a single management platform to balance our workloads across multiple clouds. It is the key to our hybrid cloud strategy – an in-house infrastructure that natively connects to cloud and optimizes costs.
Challenge
Founded in Melbourne, Forever New is a global brand, designing collections to celebrate modern femininity. It has over 400 retail and concession stores and trades in 26 countries and has a thriving e-commerce business. The company is committed to sustainability, taking responsibility for the sourcing of the materials that go into its clothes, the working conditions of staff, and the carbon footprint of its operations overall.
Retailing clothes is more complex nowadays, with consumers more demanding than ever. Companies like Forever New need to be omnichannel, giving their customers the option to buy across physical and digital touchpoints. They need to keep a tight hold on costs in an inflationary world, make direct-to-consumer sales efficient with quick-and-easy returns policies. Moreover, they must have the right IT systems to coordinate and improve the processes that make a customer-first strategy work; and this is what Forever New looked for when its legacy infrastructure came to the end of its working life. States Naresh Teckchandani, General Manager IT at Forever New, “we needed a complete overhaul to support our business strategy and also our cloud growth.”
Solution
Forever New wanted to overhaul its infrastructure that was fundamentally Dell, running Nutanix and then Microsoft Hyper-V as the virtualization software. “We looked at different solutions from all the major infrastructure providers. We decided to go with Nutanix; but we wanted the full Nutanix experience this time, replacing Hyper-V with Nutanix AHV,” says Ben Tobgui, Group Head of Infrastructure at Forever New. At the time, some stakeholders were promoting VMware as the hypervisor. “I didn’t want to go down that route,” remembers Teckchandani, “because I knew Nutanix was a long-term investment. Plus, AHV is so easy to use. You don’t need a training course to learn how to use an iPhone, and Nutanix is the same. It’s intuitive, self-explanatory, and the support is great.”
Forever New worked with Melbourne-based Nutanix Partner Perfekt to deploy Nutanix Cloud Platform for its current and future IT requirements. It replaced the legacy 16-node solution with 10 nodes of Nutanix, running AOS Storage for high-performance, scalable and resilient storage; and AHV Virtualization. Comments Tobgui, “We used ‘Nutanix Move’ to convert more than 210 VMs (virtual machines) over to AHV without any problem.” Forever New migrated its critical-business applications to Nutanix, including the enterprise resource planning (ERP), the warehouse management system (WMS), the payroll system, application programming interfaces and the product lifecycle management system (PLM). It put Nutanix at the center of its hybrid multicloud strategy, managing workloads across AWS, Azure and Citrix Cloud. “Essentially, we’re a Nutanix, SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud operation with Nutanix as the control pane across all locations,” says Tobgui.
Customer Outcome
Customer gain better experience
With Nutanix, Forever New can deliver the kind of customer experience that consumers expect from leading clothes retailers. The business-critical systems running on Nutanix that support its stores and sit behind the cloud-based e-commerce application are delivering much greater performance. As a result, Forever New has a whole new level of control over how it designs, orders and distributes clothing worldwide, so that shoppers in Australia, India or wherever the company has a presence can buy online or in-store and get a seamless level of service.
“We’ve seen performance improvements everywhere as a result of Nutanix,” says Teckchandani. Since completing the migration, middleware errors have gone, and our WMS is more accurately handing shop staff and customers’ real-time inventory data.”
Flexing up to support peak periods
The scalability of the Nutanix platform means that during sales seasons or events like Black Friday when workloads peak, system performance is still high. Therefore, anyone transacting in physical stores will get same kind of experience as they would any other time of year, and people visiting the stores will see any stock that is available on sale.
Supports a “one-click” management multicloud strategy
The company can pursue its hybrid multicloud strategy, moving workloads between private and different public clouds when it needs to, but without the cost of complexity. “Our e-commerce platform largely lives on AWS, while corporate workloads running on Azure. But not everything is cost effective in public cloud, so we use a delicate combination of on-premises private cloud and public clouds. This keeps cloud costs controlled, and ensures applications run where they best fit. Nutanix makes this approach possible with a single pane of glass to flexibly shift workloads as new assets enter the business or needs change,” said Teckchandani.
With Nutanix Prism, the IT team has a single management interface from which to administer and migrate workloads in a very simple way. “Some companies talk about single-pane-of-glass control when really they’re talking about two or three,” says Teckchandani. “With Nutanix it’s different—you really get a single pane connecting you to everything, including your public clouds. It’s truly all one-click.”
Log-in times improve by 75%
With Nutanix supporting the company’s Citrix desktops, personnel around the world are accessing the applications they need much faster than before. Comments Teckchandani, “The speed that we’re getting from Citrix on Nutanix is just phenomenal—it’s a lot, lot quicker. People feel better supported. Our offshore teams and stores, who access the information they need through Citrix, have felt it too. Logins which used to take three minutes now take 45 seconds.”
Critical data backed up as much as 87.5% quicker
There is less chance of data being lost and more network bandwidth available now that data from the ERP and other critical systems is backed up at greater speed. Eight-hour ERP backups are completed in under one-hour, and data warehouse backups, which took 12 hours are down to two hours. Backups that ran overnight and into the morning are now wrapping up well before shopfronts open.
Greater protection against cyber threats
With systems backed up regularly and at shorter intervals, the company is better able to respond to incidents, including disaster recoveries. What is more, because Nutanix is automatically patched, and therefore its storage, servers and networking are constantly up to date, this core platform provides a strengthened foundation for the business. “Nutanix is security hardened, which means our IT backbone is solid,” says Teckchandani.
Improved sustainability with 37.5% less hardware
Environmental protection is a key goal at Forever New, and that means reducing the carbon footprint wherever possible. With Nutanix, IT is now better aligned with this objective. “We have cut power consumption by cutting our former stack of 16 nodes down to just 10, which is roughly a 40% reduction. Although it’s only one rack, with Nutanix we’re moving in the right direction and mindful of our carbon footprint,” states Teckchandani.
Next Steps
With Nutanix, the company can continue to grow safe in the knowledge the Nutanix Cloud Platform will continue to deliver the level of energy efficiency that an environmentally conscious company requires. “Nutanix is a long-term investment for us,” says Teckchandani. “It fits in with how we want to develop the business. And for me, it means no more worrying about re-platforming. It’s good news.”
Partner
Established in 1998, Perfekt Pty Ltd is a leading Australian IT infrastructure, managed services, hybrid cloud, cyber security and IoT provider to the Australian market. It helps create digital transformations, through a highly client focused, integrated modernization of mainstream IT, providing digital solutions at scale to produce better business outcomes.
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