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Apptus Boosts Customer Experience and Innovation with AWS
2021
Online retailers are in a constant battle to attract and retain customers, and the right ecommerce platform can make the difference between a sale and an abandoned shopping cart.
Sweden’s Apptus has created a solution called eSales, which provides search optimization, navigation, and recommendations for businesses running ecommerce sites. eSales helps Apptus’s customers to improve their sales performance, reduce costs, and drive organizational efficiency.
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Retailers struggled during lockdowns and, thanks to the flexibility and reliability of AWS, we were part of the solution. We were able to instantly provide more compute power as ecommerce took off so our customers’ websites performed well, even with the higher loads. We wouldn't have been able to do that with our old data center.”
Peter Lindqvist
Director IT & Operations, Apptus
eSales is powered by machine learning that allows Apptus’s diverse range of merchant customers to better guide shoppers through their sites and to help them find and buy exactly what they need.
Founded and based in Sweden, most of Apptus’s early customers were located in Nordic countries. But as it grew and took on more global brands such as Avon and the H&M Group, its data center infrastructure limited its ability to scale to meet customers’ needs, expand internationally, and innovate for the future.
Apptus decided the answer was to migrate from its colocation facilities to the cloud. It needed a provider that could manage its eSales ecommerce platform’s intense memory demands and let merchants quickly roll out new capacity as needed to handle high-traffic shopping days like Black Friday. It found that solution by migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“AWS provides us with a broad range of services that allow us to grow and innovate,” says Peter Lindqvist, director IT and operations at Apptus. “And our account manager knows about more than just the technology. He helps me derive business value from our solutions.”
Quick Migration Paves Way to Global Success
Apptus migrated 95 percent of its customers to AWS in just 1 month. It performed the move with real-time production load and created a seamless experience for customers with no downtime.
“Now we can grow with our customers and meet their needs while maintaining high levels of performance and reliability,” says Lindqvist.
Apptus customers need to provide a stable ecommerce experience for their shoppers, regardless of their geographical location or network traffic levels. Because AWS offers Regions and Availability Zones across the globe, Apptus can easily provide international customers with an online presence that’s geographically close to their shoppers. This ensures their online shops run quickly, with minimal latency, and enables them to comply with regional data protection regulations.
AWS also allows Apptus to scale resources up or down to meet the varying customer demand on busy or slow shopping days. This process now requires only a few clicks, compared to the weeks or months of advance notice its data center used to require. This saves Apptus money and means shoppers can always locate the products they want and make their purchases.
Meeting High Demand with AWS Graviton2
This flexibility was tested during the pandemic, when high-street shops closed and Apptus had to respond to a 50 percent increase in customers’ ecommerce traffic. Thanks to AWS, it was able to scale up resources to meet the higher demand, meaning customers could serve shoppers online when they couldn’t serve them in shops.
“Retailers struggled during lockdowns and, thanks to the flexibility and reliability of AWS, we were part of the solution,” Lindqvist says. “We were able to instantly provide more compute power as ecommerce took off so our customers’ websites performed well, even with the higher loads. We wouldn't have been able to do that with our old data center.”
Apptus’s eSales solution runs on AWS with AWS Graviton2 processors. Custom-built by AWS, the AWS Graviton2 ARM-based processors are designed to support fast, cloud-native workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
The AWS Graviton2-based solution is secure and flexible, and optimized for high availability and a wide range of intensive compute and memory demands, exactly what Apptus requires to serve its customers well. It provides a lightweight architecture that Apptus can tailor solutions around and configure to gain maximum compute power for its workloads. Compared to its previous solution, AWS Graviton2 is more cost-effective and provides equal to better performance, says Lindqvist.
AWS Powers Innovation and The Next Big Thing
Along with providing a reliable, scalable solution for customers, moving to AWS means less maintenance and greater efficiency for the Apptus IT staff. This gives them more time to develop an even better customer experience.
Two ideas Apptus is exploring are providing more data insights to customers and improving its use of machine learning to further improve search and shopping recommendations.
“The move to AWS is just the beginning,” says Lindqvist. “We believe in experimenting with innovative ideas. If just one in ten ideas is a success, it can bring extreme value to our customers and to their shoppers. The flexibility of AWS and the toolbox it provides allows us to do that.”
About Apptus
Apptus has been at the cutting edge of high-performance computing, search and navigation technologies, recommendation engines and online behavioural analytics since its launch in 2000. Today its artificial intelligence-powered ecommerce optimization software, eSales, is redefining online merchandizing and enabling some of the worlds' leading retailers to improve sales performance, reduce costs, and drive organizational efficiency.
Benefits of AWS
- Faster, more reliable ecommerce experience for customers
- Apptus can scale to meet demand with a "few clicks"
- Migrated 95% of its customers to AWS in just 1 month
- Supporting company growth and innovation
AWS Services Used
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
AWS Graviton2
AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.
Get Started
Organizations of all sizes across all industries are transforming their businesses and delivering on their missions every day using AWS. Learn more about building and running applications without thinking about servers and start your own AWS journey today.