FranklinPlanner Improves Site Scalability And Reduces Costs by 40% With Oracle Commerce On AWS
FranklinPlanner, which created the first Franklin Day Planner in 1984 and is currently used by over 15 million people worldwide to organize home and office, needed a more efficient, cost effective solution for their website. In Q4 2017, they partnered with Pivotree to migrate their Oracle Commerce practice to an AWS cloud hosting solution resulting in 40% savings in hosting and support costs while also giving them improved scalability and enabling a faster pace of innovation and development.
%
Reduction in hosting
and support costs
1-2 DAYS
Network changes take
1-2 days instead of 2-4 weeks
Goals
FranklinPlanner needed a faster turnaround on environment changes and projects and also wanted significantly reduced hosting costs. With their previous hosting provider, some changes took an unacceptable 2-4 weeks. They knew that they needed an agile, responsive partner who could work with their in-house team in a more cooperative, intuitive manner. FranklinPlanner wanted a solution that would allow them to focus more on their business initiatives and less on IT management.
We were looking for something more flexible when it came to the support model; not having to go through as much red tape to get our builds and other configuration changes done.
Finding a reliable partner with extensive experience in managing Oracle Commerce applications was critical. Pivotree offered the substantial cost savings and Oracle Commerce application expertise that FranklinPlanner required but also impressed them with their customer-centric culture. FranklinPlanner’s internal team would now be free to focus on the development and optimization of the on-site customer experience.
Together Pivotree and FranklinPlanner determined that migrating to AWS would bring them the cost reduction they were looking for with the elastic capability of AWS to adapt to changes in traffic volume. Environments could be spun up during the busy holiday season (September through to January) and then be eliminated afterwards, saving even more money and resources.
Oracle Hosting Solution
In early 2018, Tenzing merged with Spark::red and Thinkwrap to create one of the largest premium Oracle Commerce/ATG implementation and managed services providers in the world: Pivotree. The newly combined expertise of Pivotree delivered a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for FranklinPlanner which included vital Managed Application Services (MAS), the flexibility of the AWS cloud and the confidence in their site’s ability to handle traffic that load testing provided.
By providing MAS, hosting, load testing and systems integration all under one roof, Pivotree offered FranklinPlanner a partnership that resulted in higher efficiency and quality of interaction between teams. FranklinPlanner had direct communication with Pivotree’s development team and was able to quickly reach the right person with the most knowledge for each step of the project start to finish.
Results
The new FranklinPlanner site went live in May 2018 (two weeks ahead of schedule) and resulted in a 40% reduction in hosting and support costs. Network changes are completed within days instead of weeks and tickets are handled much faster than with the previous hosting provider.
By selecting the AWS cloud hosting solution, Pivotree delivered the flexibility and scalability that FranklinPlanner needed to innovate while retaining the stability and performance of a traditional bare metal solution.
Quick Summary
Goals
- Reduce hosting costs
- Quickly scale environments to address changes in website traffic
- Find a responsive partner with expertise in hosting, managed application services and system integration to focus on the development and optimization of on-site customer experience
Solution
- Review and optimization of architecture and configurations of ATG components
- Migration services to AWS
- Configuration of BCC including scripting and cleanup
- Load testing and AWS environment sizing for excellent performance
- ATG search configuration
- Managed application services
- Hosting on AWS
- Integration with other systems
- Access to skilled experts (development, infrastructure, app specialists, DBAS, etc.) under one roof
- A single point of contract for efficient communication
Results
- Site launched 2 weeks ahead of schedule
- 40% reduction in hosting and support costs
- Network changes take 1-2 days instead of 2-4 weeks
Included Services
- Managed Application Services
- Environment Sizing and Tuning
- Integration With Other Systems
- ATG Search
- Configuration
- Hosting on AWS
- Load Testing
- Migration
Solution Benefits
- Easier scalability to address changes in site traffic related to holiday season, marketing campaigns, flash sales, etc.
- Increased ROI with no need for over-provisioned infrastructure during slower seasons so client only pays for the capacity they need at any given time
- Faster pace of innovation and development due to ease of spinning up environments to work on multiple projects and test multiple features simultaneously and then shut them down when they are no longer needed
The quality of people and the quality of work at Pivotree is very solid. Pivotree’s innovative solutions, team’s skillset and great attitude are just a few reasons we decided to partner with them. They were fantastic problem solvers. It is very re-assuring when you are going into this kind of project when you have staff that can not only identify but also fix the problem instead of going around the whole road of, “well we cannot fix it but we will pass it on to our Tier 3 support”. We felt like we already had the best support team on staff throughout the whole project.