Forever New has modernised its infrastructure by using Nutanix technology to support its maturing cloud strategy as it evolves its customer experience.
With an e-commerce platform, over 400 retail and concession stores, and a presence in 26 markets, Forever New is on a global growth trajectory.
The infrastructure refresh was required to lay the foundations for its hybrid multicloud strategy – one in which workloads are transferable between private and public clouds, promoting operational agility for a better customer experience, according to Forever New general manager for IT, Naresh Teckchandani.
“Our Melbourne datacentre powers everything from our very own Chadstone shop floor to our stores on Singapore’s Orchard Road and London’s White City,” he said.
“With multiple ways for shoppers to reach us all around the world for a seamless shopping experience, backend performance is the essence of a better, more personalised customer experience (CX). With Nutanix, we’ve woven confidence into our infrastructure outfit.”
Forever New’s initial implementation in 2016 included Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure, which collapsed the previous three-tier array of separate server, storage, and networking technology in its datacentre. In February 2023, Forever New completed its infrastructure modernisation project, replacing its Dell infrastructure running Hyper-V for Nutanix AHV, which sped up essential infrastructure and enterprise applications.
Forever New group head of infrastructure, Ben Tobgui said, “Since completing the migration, middleware errors have gone, and our Warehouse Management System is more accurately providing shop staff and customers real-time inventory data.
“Performance of the underlying infrastructure has immensely improved. Our offshore teams and stores, who access the information they need through Citrix, have felt it too. Logins which used to take minutes now connect in seconds.”
Performance improvements also extend to online application programming interfaces (APIs), payroll systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and product lifecycle management. Ease of migration, cost of migration, cloud readiness, and future proofing were core motivations behind the infrastructure refresh.
“Our e-commerce platform largely lives on AWS, while corporate workloads run on Azure. But not everything is cost effective in public cloud, so we use a combination of on-premises private cloud and public clouds. This keeps cloud costs controlled, and ensures applications run where they best fit,” Teckchandani said.
“Nutanix simplifies managing this environment through a single pane of glass, giving us the flexibility to move workloads across clouds as new assets enter the business or as needs change – this aligns perfectly with our hybrid multi cloud strategy,” Tobgui added.