Majestically Carrenza

One of the UK's larger wine retailers, Majestic Wine, and has grown from a single store in London's Wood Green in 1980 to over 200 wine warehouses throughout the UK. The company aims to provide high quality customer service and advice, as well as a wide diversity and quantity of stock available coupled to the ability to order in-store or online, with free delivery throughout mainland UK.

Although the company has maintained an ecommerce platform since 2000, the technology behind the site has shown serious signs struggling under the pressure as more and more of its customers turned to the internet to purchase wines from the comfort of their homes. It reached the point where the next big challenge for the company was to translate that success into the online space.

The company it selected to help it develop its next stage of ecommerce was Carrenza, which specialises in providing end-to-end cloud services such as on-demand IaaS and PaaS solutions. It will be providing the infrastructure that hosts Majestic’s implementation of the Intershop platform, as well as the supporting management services.

According to Richard Weaver, Ecommerce Director at Majestic Wine, the company was looking for a service provider that could not only provide high service availability but also sufficient flexibility to cope with the evolving ecommerce market for years to come.

"Our main concern in selecting a hosting partner was one of scalability,” Weaver said. “We were looking for an infrastructure solution that would allow us to scale both in the short term for our peak sales period at Christmas, and in the long term as our customers increasingly experience Majestic through our online channels."

For a retailer like Majestic, the need to improve this was paramount, as the internet is becoming an integral part of its business. With new technologies such as mobile and social also playing an important role in the web presence of many firms, being able to incorporate these was also something Majestic needed to think about.

Weaver said: "We opted for Carrenza because of their proven track record in delivering some of Europe’s busiest ecommerce environments, often having to cope with seasonal peaks and varying demand. This gives us the peace of mind that comes from having a reliable ecommerce infrastructure that we can scale as and when we need it.

“Another benefit is they are the preferred IaaS provider of both Intershop and Javelin Group, our development partner and integrator. Carrenza has worked with these firms before and so their knowledge of this environment meant we were able to greatly reduce our time to market through automation.”