Merkle Modernizes Ulysse Nardin’s Sales Presence with AWS

By containerizing Magento’s main technical components, Merkle was able to deliver a modern and complete ecommerce content management system (CMS) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Embracing automation and portability, Ulysse Nardin improved flexibility, reliability, speed to market, security, and performance of their new platform to better serve its customers. Modernization from AWS technologies allowed Ulysse Nardin to manage its platform more efficiently to better personalize the customer experience in the moment.

The ecommerce team at Ulysse Nardin was looking to modernize its online sales presence to handle growing demands and keep up with digital-first customer preferences. Introducing a new ecommerce content management system (CMS) platform, a new culture of product-based development, and deployment in a new environment on AWS can be overwhelming for many organizations if not well managed and orchestrated. The previous solution was a monolithic architecture that lacked intelligent insights, using waterfall-based deployments that had reliability issues under high loads. The new solution had to be well-architected and be performant, available, and secure to sufficiently justify the investment.

Merkle recommended AWS for Ulysse Nardin because it is a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers, including fast-growing startups, large enterprises, and leading government agencies use AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. Brands choose AWS for its open, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions for scaling mission critical workloads.

Ulysse Nardin brought in Merkle as their preferred AWS Partner because of the existing strong relationship and Merkle’s extensive experience helping top global brands deliver personalized customer experiences based on data-driven, customer-centric strategies. Merkle’s experience lies in the intersection of technology, data, analytics, and partner relationships to deliver the experience-based marketing strategies that build enduring customer relationships and drive competitive advantage for the brands served.

A modern highly available and automated ecommerce platform was built on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) with a fault tolerant, observable, secure and scalable architecture with customer experience in mind. Features include a full CI/CD Development and Deployment pipeline using BitBucket and Bamboo and a robust Kubernetes cluster leveraging Helm Charts and Terraform to quickly scale and deploy repeatable environments and architecture using infrastructure as code (IAC). A secure docker container repository using Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) was implemented as well a distributed and scalable de-coupled architecture using Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon ElastiCache. 

Ulysse Nardin gained full observability, monitoring, and logging using Amazon CloudWatch, DataDog, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and AWS CloudTrail, security by AWS WAF and AWS Shield, in public and private Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) secured by AWS VPN and least privilege role based access using AWS Identity and Access Management and best-in-class data solutions for Disaster Recovery such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Elastics Block Store (Amazon EBS) , and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The Merkle team was able to deploy a highly available and automated ecommerce platform that can scale to handle and optimize to fit the needs of a growing global brand. Leveraging full automation and a robust DevOps pipeline, it increased reliability, speed of development, and a stable and simple to manage architecture that guaranteed availability to handle high customer traffic and demand. Consistent deployments with automated testing simplified by one touch releases allowed the Ulysse Nardin team to orchestrate personalization faster.

The solution allowed Ulysse Nardin to move toward a simpler management and oversight of its ecommerce platform that allowed for configuration over custom development with Magento. Operations became easier to manage with a Kubernetes-based architecture that offers full observability, traceability, and security. Merkle developed a solution that achieves the best of both worlds with Magento as the CMS and AWS to host the infrastructure. Additionally, the solution delivered a self-monitoring auto scaling solution with back up and redundancy capabilities. The open, scalable, and performant Kubernetes Magento cloud solution will continue to position Ulysse Nardin for success as they scale investments into their architecture.