Google Cloud announced on January 10 that Wayfair (NYSE: W), one of the world’s largest online destinations for the home, is using Google Cloud as the foundation for its new hybrid cloud strategy. Wayfair’s move to the cloud will help the $8 billion global retailer scale its operations, while providing a richer experience for its 19 million active customers, 16,000 employees, and 11,000 suppliers.
Wayfair debuted its hybrid cloud strategy earlier this year, partnering with Google Cloud to handle the burst capacity needed to successfully run Way Day—the company’s annual furniture and home decor sale that brings in thousands of new customers and involves millions of transactions. Wayfair now uses several different Google Cloud solutions—including compute, storage, and networking, data and analytics, and G Suite productivity tools—to enhance a shopping experience that delights customers from product discovery to final delivery.
More specifically, Google Cloud is helping Wayfair to:
- Optimize performance and resiliency: Wayfair’s Infrastructure Engineering team, which manages the availability, latency, performance and capacity of the company’s systems, is working closely with Google Cloud’s SRE (site reliability engineering), professional services and account teams to constantly tune performance and ensure a smooth customer experience during times of heavy web traffic, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Support scaling data-driven decisions: Using Google Cloud to augment its robust in-house data analytics operations, Wayfair analysts can continue to identify trends and patterns at a massive scale, while confidently making real-time decisions as the business grows. From merchandising to personalized customer experiences to marketing and promotion campaigns, Wayfair’s data-driven approach provides the company with valuable and actionable insights across every part of the business.
- Increase employee productivity: The retailer’s employees are using G Suite–including Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Meet–to instantly connect with co-workers, collaborate, and improve information-sharing across the organization. Additionally, with the ability to instantly provision compute and storage capacity on Google Cloud, Wayfair’s engineers are seamlessly collaborating and rapidly bringing new ideas to market to continue to offer a transformative e-commerce experience.
“As an e-commerce leader, Wayfair has always been committed to improving the shopping experience with cutting-edge technologies, and that’s why we partnered with an innovator in the retail technology space like Google Cloud,” said Steve Crusenberry, vice president, infrastructure and platform engineering, Wayfair. “Google won us over with the speed, reliability and performance of their technology, but more importantly, their team’s willingness to work side-by-side with us at every level to solve our trickiest scaling challenges.”
“Retailers face urgent challenges whether it’s the need to reach consumers on new channels, integrate disparate systems, or build entirely new revenue streams based on new technology tools like AI and ML,” said Carrie Tharp, Vice President, Retail at Google Cloud. “We’re proud to partner with Wayfair, one of the fastest-moving and most innovative retailers in the world, on their technology transformation journey.”
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