Internet Fusion Scales for Growth with AWS and Rackspace
London – 17th January, 2018 – Rackspace® today announces that it has helped Internet Fusion, a company that runs a number of bespoke retail e-commerce websites successfully migrate to AWS. This comes as the retailer strengthens its platform to cope with future growth, following its acquisition of Surfdome, one of its key competitors.
Internet Fusion was founded by three university friends who wanted to buy specialist outdoor gear online. Since its inception, Internet Fusion is working to increase its annual turnover to £100 million and boasts 10 sites in its portfolio.
Based in the UK, it owns and operates e-commerce platforms for brands such as Blackleaf, Priory and Ride-away Equestrian. With a focus on niche audiences, Internet Fusion builds an integrated international web presence for its retail brands, backed by a tailored customer service and warehousing solution.
Given the intense competition in the online retail space, the firm knew it had to build a platform that provided the fastest and most reliable shopping experience possible. This is particularly relevant, given the fact that recent findings suggest 53% of visits to mobile retail shops are abandoned after three seconds, if any issues with lag-time are encountered.
Internet Fusion turned to both the Fanatical Support® for AWS and its Professional Services teams at Rackspace to help them move to the cloud from a static VMware infrastructure to scale with demand, while still delivering a reliable customer service.
The two companies took the decision to move Internet Fusion’s infrastructure to AWS. Rackspace advised on how to best manage workflow and automating application level deployment, so each site in Internet Fusion’s portfolio can now scale up and down without manual intervention. Taking place across all its sites in eight weeks, the migration has already driven business value with increased traffic and sales substantially, playing a part in doubling the firm’s Black Friday sales in 2017.
Importantly, this was also completed before the holiday shopping season, Internet Fusion’s peak trading period of the year.
Ian Bristow, Founder and Head of Online at Internet Fusion said: “When your business is only turning over £2 million a year and the server goes down, sales are affected. But when you’re earning substantial revenue as we do, the stakes are higher, and the business becomes dependant on showcasing good performance.
“Moving with Rackspace to an AWS cloud solution helps me sleep better at night – knowing, if my hardware fails, Internet Fusion is protected and fully managed. In my opinion, AWS is the biggest cloud player, and we feel it matches with our ambitions in terms of innovation. We couldn’t have done it without Rackspace. Their deep AWS cloud expertise and understanding of our business means that we can now re-focus on our customers and growing our business further.”
Iskandar Najmuddin, Specialist Architect, Rackspace said: “Internet Fusion has proven that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to innovate. Making incremental changes to your processes through reusing and re-fitting an existing platform means you can keep disruption to a minimum and show quick wins back to the wider business. By supplementing in-house expertise on the sector with our own on managed cloud, the team at Internet Fusion has been able to move forward, acquiring new sites and handling spikes in traffic.”
In the next year, Internet Fusion hope to bring their new portfolio websites it has acquired as part of their Surfdome deal onto the AWS platform, while continuing to grow its business by making its sites operationally efficient– providing an industry-leading ecommerce experience.
About Rackspace
Rackspace, the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it all on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise, easy-to-use tools, and Fanatical Support® for leading technologies including AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenStack and VMware.
The company serves customers in 150 countries, including more than half of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide, and has been honored by Fortune, Forbes, and others as one of the best companies to work for. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.
About Internet Fusion
What is Internet Fusion? To our customers we’re primarily an action-sports lifestyle retailer. To our competitors we’re an e-commerce company. But what we really are is a technology business. We have a portfolio of 10 international websites that focus on a variety of different markets, but each has a bespoke, purpose built back-end system that runs every function in the business.
Providing the best gear from the world’s leading brands to everyone from the novice to the enthusiast; the Internet Fusion Umbrella has got it all covered.
We’re connected with our customers and we know what’s needed to take them from a fun day out to a life-changing experience using premium quality kit and the info to help them choose it.
The key to Internet Fusion's success? Efficiency and agility. When you marry up operating efficiency with agility you insulate yourself from market forces and multiply the value to your bottom line. We're constantly striving for operational efficiency using an iterative, first move approach.
