AWS partner leads Kathmandu's trek to cloud

Trans-Tasman AWS partner Fronde has won a cloud migration for major outdoor clothing retailer Kathmandu.

The retailer, which has more than 150 bricks and mortar stores in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, replaced its previous unnamed infrastructure provider with Fronde after an outage during its 2014 winter sale.

Peak demand resulted in a slow or unresponsive site, to which the retailer’s infrastructure provider at the time “wasn’t able to respond” fast enough, according to Kathmandu web development manager James Deane.

He said it took around 12 hours for the issue to be resolved, with costs resulting from an increase in traffic to a call centre.

Kathmandu turned to Fronde, a New Zealand-headqaurtered cloud integrator whose Australian business placed No.14 in the 2014 CRN Fast50 with local revenue of $5.6 million.

Fronde migrated the retailer’s site, based on the Magento e-commerce platform, to AWS. The systems run in the AWS Sydney region, with redundancy across availability zones. Features include EC23 instances for compute, Amazon RDS for database, Amazon VPC for network topology and EC2 autoscaling. Fronde is also supplying managed services for the application platform.

“The benefit for us is that we only pay for servers when we need them,” said Deane. “We needed a solution that would allow customers to shop online at any time of the year from anywhere – including peak sale periods – and enjoy a fantastic experience.”

Until that point, the company had been paying a flat-rate for peak requirements, which were only needed for 20 days of the year. The previous system could handle traffic generated on 345 days of the year, but had difficulty during sales.

The retailer is now working on introducing the ability for customers to rate and review products, and will also introduce the option of ordering online and picking up a product in the store.

It’s one of several technology projects for Kathmandu in the last few years. In 2013 it announced a move to Microsoft Dynamics for its backend systems and point of sale, with a two-year, multimillion-dollar deal with Sable Systems, a Melbourne-based reseller that twice appeared in the CRN Fast50, first in 2011 and then in 2013.

The retailer also tapped Dimension Data in 2013 for cloud infrastructure to support its Dynamics rollout, provide test environments during various projects and to support global expansion.