IT pros in retail are sold on these 6 products

Giant spikes in traffic and transactions created problems for DailyLook, an online fashion brand that distinguishes itself by styling complete outfits for shoppers.

“When our company’s traffic increased 100-fold, seemingly overnight, we were faced with huge infrastructure costs, and our websites response times were unacceptably slow, which resulted in a major spike in bounce rates,” recalls Eric Marston, CTO and co-founder of DailyLook.

Switching to Instart Logic application delivery service yielded immediate returns, including a 35% boost in conversion rates, Marston says. DailyLook also was able to cut its cloud hosting costs by more than $2,000 a month because of the reduced load.

“With about 50% of our site traffic coming from mobile, having an optimized mobile-friendly website and application interface was critical,” Marston says. “After evaluating a number of content distribution network (CDN) services, we found that most were optimized only for static content. Not only is Instart Logic’s software-defined application delivery service extremely flexible, but the product allowed us to turbo-charge our mobile website and application performance, increase conversion rates, dramatically reduced bandwidth costs and create great user experiences.”

Marston is one of six IT pros from the retail industry who shared their go-to tools when we asked IT pros to name their favorite products.

PernixData, which makes a storage hypervisor that virtualizes flash storage arrays, won over Joe Titra. “PernixData FVP software complements our existing server and storage environment without requiring any rip and replace,” says Titra, senior systems engineer at Fanatics, an online retailer of licensed sports apparel based in Jacksonville, Fla.

“It optimizes both reads and writes using fault tolerant memory, giving us optimal performance with zero changes to the company’s applications, hosts, or storage,” Titra says. “We saw a noticeable drop in I/O utilization on our storage arrays, and substantially lower web page response times. Average VM latency on our e-commerce application went from approximately 12 ms to

August Azzarello, IS quality assurance engineer at The Container Store, wrote in about his favorite: AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform, a management platform that’s designed to help companies see what’s going on in their application environments and take action when application performance is affecting the business.

“AppDynamics helps give us clear insight into our infrastructure(s), in both production and test environments. This allows us to more efficiently focus on performance and stability by notifying us of problem spots. More and more, we are realizing the power of AppDynamics, not only from a true production monitoring platform, but in development and test processes,” Azzarello says. “Simple implementation of alerting, instant increased knowledge of our infrastructure and application performance, and visual dashboards for every type of audience make it a complete solution.”

The Container Store is working toward being more proactive instead of reactive to application problems – a shift Azzarello calls “priceless.” That includes wrapping the retailer’s development and QA processes around AppDynamics to enable automated testing. The platform will alert IT to any metric deviation in a test environment, which will help identify potential pitfalls such as increased hardware utilization and/or error counts in test.

“AppDynamics is also used to create data flow maps to aid in targeted integration testing,” Azzarello says. “We recently used AppDynamics on a stability/performance focused sprint with great results, such as improving general performance statistics by ~40% with one deployment. Being able to prove this performance upgrade in a test environment, and watching it move into production with the same outcome was an incredible experience.”

Looking ahead, The Container Store is working to implement a more scalable automated test suite that will increase test coverage, improve efficiency, and improve quality on each release, he says.

“AppDynamics will have an increasing role in this strategy, giving us the ability to automate infrastructure and application reporting, and alert on differences between code changes,” Azzarello says. “This strategy will better our ability to continuously code, test, and deploy, by saving time on the reporting side.”

Ramsey Kingston, IT administrator at NaturaLawn of America, also raved about monitoring software. Her favorite — Birch Grove Software’s ActivTrak– is designed for tracking people and productivity.

“As a small business with a microscopic tech budget and a telemarketing team that spends most of their time waiting for people to pick up their phones, we have had a lot of issues with computer misuse — which equals possible security threats,” Kingston says. “ActivTrak has allowed me to monitor our trouble users, document misuse for write-ups, terminate applications and websites if needed, and greatly reduce security risks while increasing productivity.”

Compliance with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is another issue for retailers, which must ensure that they process, store and transmit credit card information in a secure environment. Firehouse Subs, a restaurant chain with more than 860 locations, relies on Netsurion’s Managed PCI service.

“Netsurion simplifies PCI for myself, and our franchisees, allowing us to maintain focus on other portions of our business,” says Jeremy Gibeault, senior manager of information systems at Firehouse Subs. “Netsurion utilizes a remote setup for their cloud-managed firewalls in each restaurant per our specifications, monitors those firewalls, and alerts us if suspicious traffic is, or has been, attempting to access our network. When the need arises, the customer service has been great and the technical support team at Netsurion is always very responsive which, in turn, allows our franchisees to focus more time on serving our customers and less time dealing with these sorts of issues.”

When ALDO Group wanted to modernize its ecommerce platform, the Canadian retailer turned to data-integration software maker Talend. ALDO’s new ecommerce architecture integrates more than 100 different applications, services and databases and manages everything from online order entry and payment through to billing and fraud detection.

The Talend Platform for Data Services is a flexible, multi-purpose system that handles data integration, ESB and more, says Mathieu Laforge, IT director of development at ALDO, which sells footwear and accessories in more than 1,750 stores in 82 countries.

“It is the best solution for everything related to data management. [Talend Platform for Data Services] supported the creation of our next-generation, robust and scalable service-oriented architecture which powers ALDO’s updated ecommerce platform [and] enabled us to optimize order processing, significantly improve operational visibility, and respond more rapidly to the changing needs of our business,” Laforge says. “Importantly, Talend empowers us to deliver a more memorable and enjoyable shopping experience to consumers.”