UK Retailer Uses Cloud Services to Quickly Scale

Major TV and Social Media Campaigns

“We had a matter of weeks to get the Magic & Sparkle

website up and running, and knew that Microsoft
Customer: Marks and Spencer
Website: www.marksandspencer.com Azure would provide us with the speed, scale, and
Customer Size: 82,000 employees
Country or Region: United Kingdom elasticity that such an important campaign required.”
Industry: Retail and consumer goods John Pillar, Head of Software Engineering (Mobile, Labs, Retail-IT, and Digital Stores),
Marks and Spencer
Customer Profile
Marks and Spencer is one of the UK’s
December is the most important month of the year for UK
oldest and best-loved retailers, known for
its high-quality food and clothing. It has retailer Marks and Spencer, and its advertising campaigns are
800 stores and a growing e-commerce
the cornerstone of its holiday strategy. When its 2013 primetime
business, employing around 82,000 staff.
holiday TV ad campaign encouraged people to visit a dedicated
Software and Services
website, it was vital that it could cope with the spike in traffic.
 Microsoft Azure
 Solutions The retailer created a website using Microsoft Azure to support
− Microsoft Services Premier Support
huge volumes of traffic while avoiding the expense of
for Developers
purchasing physical servers and relying on internal IT resources.

Business Needs they are and using whatever device they

For more information about other
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Marks and Spencer (M&S) was founded in
1884 and is regarded as one of the UK’s
most popular retailers. It has a presence in
more than 50 countries, employs around
82,000 people, and has 800 stores in the
UK alone, in addition to a major e-
commerce business. A key objective is to
turn the M&S .com site into its flagship
store and the retailer is also pursuing an
omnichannel strategy. The IT support for
this comes from the 80-person software
engineering team in the .Com
Development division. “We are aiming to
provide our customers with the ability to
purchase products at any time, wherever
choose,” says John Pillar, Head of Software
Engineering for Mobile, Labs, Retail-IT and
Digital Stores at Marks and Spencer.
Like many retailers, December is the most
important time of year for M&S. The 2013
holiday season featured a major
multichannel marketing campaign called
Magic & Sparkle, which drove consumers
to the M&S website and encouraged them
to vote on the name of a loveable dog
who was featured in the campaign. Magic
& Sparkle also included a primetime TV ad
campaign (including a slot in one of the
UK’s most viewed programs, Downton
Abbey) and extensive social media
promotion. The campaign aimed to reach
97 percent of the UK adult population over
the holiday period, interacting with each
person at least three times. “We had no idea
exactly when these interactions would take
place, so the whole site design had to be
elastic and able to scale to cope with the
potentially huge volumes of traffic,” says
Pillar. “M&S is a brand that relies on trust
and if the additional traffic had slowed the
e-commerce site and made it hard for
consumers to purchase products, that
would have been unacceptable.”
Solution
When the M&S marketing director came to
John in October and outlined the Magic &
Sparkle campaign, the software engineering
team had to move quickly. It was decided
early in the process that a cloud platform
was the only way forward. “The culture in
my team is similar to that of a start-up in
terms of speed, agility, and innovation, and
we absolutely wanted a platform to reflect
that,” says Pillar.
John’s team had previously worked with
Microsoft Azure, a cloud platform that
provides on-demand compute, storage,
content delivery, and networking
capabilities from Microsoft data centers, in
other areas of the business—an e-boutique
in Amsterdam and in-store kiosks—so he
was familiar with its capabilities. “We had a
matter of weeks to get the Magic & Sparkle
website up and running, and knew that
Microsoft Azure would provide us with the
speed, scale, and elasticity that such an
important campaign required,” says Pillar.
“By using Azure, we could have the site up
in hours if needed. If we engaged with our
internal infrastructure team, it would take
days just to build the server, so in terms of
work hours, using Azure is invaluable.”
The Microsoft Services Premier Support
team also played a major role in bringing
the Magic & Sparkle campaign to life.
“Testing was critical,” says Pillar. “We quickly
engaged with Microsoft Services through
This case study is for informational purposes only.
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Document published August 2014
the Microsoft Services Premier Support for scale. Because they can use Azure to
Developers program, where the team quickly scale campaigns as needed,
helped us make sure that the technology engineers have more time to focus on
could scale at the levels we required.” what they really excel at, such as writing
code. “Campaigns like Magic & Sparkle are
A proof-of-concept site was set up and very resource intensive and using Azure for
during testing, the volume of traffic led to short-term projects is extremely
a bottleneck. Microsoft Services allocated a affordable,” says Pillar. “In terms of team
section of a data center in Amsterdam and productivity, Azure provides a massive
supplied beta load test software to ensure boost for M&S.”
that the bottleneck was eliminated. “A lot
of people worked tirelessly to help us Supports Overall Business Goals
prepare for the campaign; it really was a Beyond the Magic & Sparkle campaign,
phenomenal effort from the Microsoft M&S uses Azure elsewhere and it is a key
Services team,” says Pillar. factor for the retailer to achieve its
omnichannel vision. “Azure has grown with
Benefits us as we have grown, and it is a perfect fit
Using Microsoft Azure as the platform for for M&S as we look to innovate in our use
Magic & Sparkle really paid off for M&S. It of technology,” says Pillar.
was a strong cultural fit with the
engineering team and helped ensure that
the campaign (and cornerstone of the
retailer’s 2013 holiday season) was a
success. “The biggest endorsement of
Azure is that we have used it again for
campaigns of a similar nature—for
Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and many
more holidays,” says Pillar. “We know that
if a campaign goes viral and the traffic
goes crazy, Azure will scale to whatever
levels we need.”
Saves Costs and Resources
Its decision to deploy a cloud-based
platform meant that M&S made
substantial cost savings on the
infrastructure for Magic & Sparkle. There
was no need to engage with its internal
infrastructure teams or request that they
spend valuable time preparing M&S’s own
infrastructure. “The full site was up and
running in one week—if we had used
internal resources, the process would have
taken two months,” says Pillar.
The engineering team particularly
appreciates the self-service and speed
when provisioning Azure components. This
makes things quicker and easier when
building the solution, while Azure also
eliminates concerns about capacity and
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