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Dell Uses Cloud Solution to Manage Online Traffic, Customer Deals During the 2013 Holiday Season

“Windows Azure extracted a lot of the operational worries.... It handled all that for us, so we could focus on just delivering the features and capabilities that the business needed.” Jim Keane, Executive Director for Site Operations, and CSB Product Unit Manager at Dell

Facing an ever-growing number of online shoppers looking for great deals over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday holiday weekend, computer manufacturer Dell used Windows Azure to rapidly build and implement a deal management solution for the 2013 season. The solution managed traffic and added new levels of business agility for online “deal” campaigns.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published February 2014 Business Needs Solution expense. Despite an unprecedented Based in Round Rock, Texas, Dell Inc. is Upon analysis, Jim Keane, Executive wave of incoming traffic over the one of the largest technology Director for Site Operations and Thanksgiving weekend, Dell.com corporations in the world and a Product Unit Manager for Dell.com, achieved continuous uptime and a new longtime Microsoft partner. Its online working with Operations Architects level of business agility. retail division, Dell.com, manages a high Andy Wahrenberger and Morgan volume of daily customer visits to its Logue, found that a significant amount Effective Peak-Period Traffic websites. Converting visits to purchases of incoming traffic was to a single Management —that is, providing the information and page that identified the current deals. Between the early hours of Black Friday user experience to engage visitors to Because Dell was already an avid user and midnight at the end of Cyber the point of a purchase decision—is key of Visual Studio and Microsoft .NET, Monday, the deals site received more to the design and support model for the Windows Azure felt to both of them than 920 million hits, representing company's online presence. like the natural choice for creating a more than 60 percent of all Dell.com solution. traffic during that period. Of these, By far the busiest season for handling more than 140 million went directly to online retail activity for US Dell sales is Using Windows Azure, Wahrenberger Windows Azure as the point of origin. the Thanksgiving weekend—from Black and Logue moved that page from the Peak traffic on the Windows Azure site Friday to Cyber Monday. During this Dell on-premises servers to a cloud- during this time was more than 2,000 four-day period, Dell aligns many of its based environment, effectively but page transactions per second. There sales efforts with time-specific “deal” invisibly redirecting a large share of was zero downtime, and none of the campaigns that it publishes on its site. overall Dell.com visitors to a separate four single-core virtual machines These deals capitalize on the surge of cloud-based site. They created new running in the Windows Azure retail activity in order to drive a business logic for the virtual site that environment exceeded 25 percent maximum number of conversions. business users at Dell could use to utilization. The billing for this period Recent data from InternetRetailer.com publish deals, expire deals, and make was negligible. Says Keane, “It was a shows that Cyber Monday purchasing other deal campaign–related decisions very effective cost model for us, alone increased more than 20 percent based on real-time data from the indeed.” between 2012 and 2013 for companies Windows Azure site's activity. All data in the technology retail online space, was published through Windows In the end, because of this freedom and many customers relied on short- Azure to the Dell content delivery from performance worries despite a term deals to make purchase decisions. network vendor. massive influx of customers, the Dell.com team was able to have more At Dell.com, year-over-year traffic Development went quickly. productive conversations both during during the Black Friday weekend was Wahrenberger started with a Visual and following the long weekend event likewise exceeding expectations. To Studio 2013 wizard for creating than they had in past years. “It wasn't a support the Black Friday weekend guarded websites with designated discussion about whether the system shopping experience for 2013, Dell administrators. “I created a site, and was going to handle the load,” faced the challenge of provisioning with a couple of clicks, I created login Wahrenberger and Logue said. “It was: sufficient infrastructure to handle the abilities I could designate to business ‘We have so many new customers now. spike in visitor traffic. It also needed users. Once I enrolled those users, they How do we keep them? How do we meaningful data to drive business rules could go create and manage the get even more of our online deals to for publishing, altering, and removing deals,” Wahrenberger says. Similarly, convert to sales?’” special deals in ways that were not he used a service bus worker role disruptive to the customer conversion wizard to enable message processing Keane agrees. “The solution drove very experience. Past years had seen and manage the off-site caching of positive results for the business,” he difficulties in these areas, including site pages, a vital part of high-volume says. “Windows Azure extracted a lot downtime due to traffic overloads, and traffic management. of the operational worries. It allowed lost sales due to customers clicking on our business teams to focus on expired deals and then shopping Benefits managing the Black Friday period elsewhere. The Windows Azure solution helped purely from a business perspective Dell achieve key benefits with minimal rather than worrying about the investment of time and operational systems. It handled all that for us, so

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published February 2014 we could focus on just delivering the a result, Dell could publish the integration with Visual Studio wizards features and capabilities that the maximum number of deals in a short and templates, such as the ones used business needed.” period of time and reduce the for creating the site. The built-in likelihood of shoppers leaving the site performance capabilities of Windows Enhanced Deal Campaign because they clicked on the deal they Azure also played a key role in making Management wanted, only to find it was sold out. it the right choice for quickly and In past years, Dell had no mechanism “We were trying to ensure that effective easing the burden on Dell's for reporting in detail on site activity incoming visitors had our best on-premises IT assets. pertaining to specific deals. The expectation of being converted to Windows Azure solution provided customers,” Wahrenberger and Logue Keane also credits the support his ongoing data about the state of deals, said. team received from the Microsoft such as which deals were selling well, account team as valuable in making which deals were not selling, and which Rapid Time-to-Solution the solution a success. “The ability to were sold out. All engineering of the Windows Azure liaise with the Windows Azure support Using this data, business users at Dell solution at Dell took place within three and product teams was exactly what could use the solution to respond to weeks of the holiday weekend sales we needed to stay on track,” he says, sales conditions in real time—for event. Keane, Wahrenberger, and pointing out that there were far fewer example, to publish new deals and to Logue attribute this rapid time-to- issues to address than for the typical manually expire sold-out deals before solution to the ease of using Windows first version of an IT solution. they were set to expire in the system. As Azure's familiar toolset, including

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published February 2014