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.

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.

Jared Lee
VP eCommerce

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.

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.

Jared Lee
VP eCommerce

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.