The Ocado founders were way ahead of their time when, back in 2000, they
started the UK’s only ‘pure play’ online grocery operator. Today Ocado is the
world’s largest dedicated online grocery supermarket, exceeding £1 billion in
annual sales. Developing the innovative software and systems that power the
online retail business is Ocado Technology, a division of software developers,
engineers, researchers, and scientists spread across five offices: Hatfield (UK),
Wroclaw and Krakow (Poland), Sofia (Bulgaria), and Barcelona (Spain).
Ocado delivers happiness when its drivers trudge through the snow delivering
Christmas orders; indeed, this going-the-extra-mile attitude is what keeps its
600,000 customers coming back for more. But when you consider the Ocado
motto ‘shopping made easy’, there is nothing easy about delivering on that
promise. In a mind-bogglingly complex process, a typical Ocado warehouse
packs and ships more than one million items each day, supported through a
technology platform built in house. Additionally, the Ocado family now also
includes Fetch (a specialist online pet store) and Sizzle (homeware), both
firmly based on the technology platform built by Ocado Technology. Recent
e-commerce sites such as Morrisons and Fabled, a beauty destination site
in partnership with Marie Claire, are more recent success stories for Ocado
Technology.
In parallel, Ocado Technology is also developing the Ocado Smart Platform
(OSP), an end-to-end e-commerce solution designed to put other brick-and-
mortar retailers around the world online. From its user-friendly mobile apps and
webshop to highly efficient automated warehouse technology, OSP offers
superior customer experience and a highly efficient end-to-end supply chain solution.
Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic
INDUSTRYRetail
LOCATIONHatfield, UK
EMPLOYEESOver 12,000
USE CASEMigrate the Ocado Smart Platform to
the cloud and gain full-stack visibility
so that any performance issues can
be identified and addressed before
they impact customer experience.
PRODUCTS USEDNew Relic APM, New Relic Browser,
New Relic Synthetics, and New Relic
Insights
WHY NEW RELICPowerful visualisation capabilities,
insight into the customer’s browser
experience, and effective out-of-the-
box team collaboration
HIGHLIGHTS• Increased confidence in cloud
migration and development
projects
• Improved team collaboration across
1,000 geographically dispersed
developers, operations, and other
technical functions
• Quickly identified performance
bottlenecks, reducing costs
• Delivered annual cost savings of
£100,000
Customer Case Study
Ocado now offers OSP as a managed service capability to partners internationally,
enabling them to build sustainable, scalable, and profitable online grocery
businesses in their own markets.
Cloud move demands increased visibilityIn 2014 Ocado found itself in a transitional period. Demands on its business were
increasing and Ocado felt that a move to a cloud infrastructure would give the
company more flexibility and scalability. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen
as the target environment.
Peter Thomas, head of E-Commerce OSP at Ocado Technology, shares his insight:
‘One of the challenges was that the dashboards we had developed to monitor
the various sites and the platform behind it were not compatible with AWS and
needed to be replaced. I had used New Relic technology before and wondered if
that might be our answer.’
New Relic’s Digital Intelligence Platform was introduced to
support the cloud migration, including integrating well over
100 microservice applications into the OSP platform. New
Relic acted very much as a ‘security blanket,’ as Thomas
termed it: ‘New Relic APM provided the extra visibility into
our systems and platforms, which we needed. It gave us
confidence that our migration was going as expected, and,
if not, we were in a very good position to address any issues
early. We learned lots about cloud architecture, and it was
great having New Relic there to reassure us nothing was
quietly going wrong behind the scenes.’
New Relic became more pervasive within Ocado and is now
often used to pinpoint the root cause of any performance
issues. A notable example was when one of the OSP backend
systems showed a gradual performance degradation that
was in danger of impacting customer orders. Customer
satisfaction is vitally important for Ocado, and a lot of effort
was spent on finding out what was wrong. Confusingly, different systems that
were seemingly unconnected were affected. It wasn’t until an engineer used New
Relic Insights to represent the problem that it became clear that although the
database systems were all different, they were hosted on the same physical
machine, which was the root cause of the problem.
New Relic Browser enables us to see what’s actually happening within our customers’ browsers. It gives us confidence that we are building solutions which work for our customers in the real world.
Peter ThomasHead of E-Commerce OSP, Ocado Technology
Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic
‘New Relic made it easy for us to visualise and track this issue in real time’, says
Thomas. ‘It helped resolve this particular problem a lot faster than we could
otherwise have done.’
Better collaboration for a better customer experienceOcado Technology works with a globally distributed team of 1,000 developers,
all working on different parts of the estate simultaneously. New Relic is used to
provide a central overview and a common communication tool. Thomas loves
that the features to enable this effective team collaboration come straight out
of the box with New Relic: ‘We’ve tried other products which needed a lot of
configuration. As soon as you start customising the solution with so many teams,
it becomes very difficult to manage and maintain. New Relic did an excellent job
at giving us some very sensible defaults which we could easily build on.’
It wasn’t just the internal collaboration that made New Relic
a success within Ocado; the New Relic team itself took an
active interest in how Ocado used the toolset. A centre of
excellence was introduced, consisting of New Relic and
Ocado experts. As a team, they discuss the New Relic road
map and what other features could prove useful. Having that
deep insight into how OSP operates has enabled this team to
really add value to Ocado.
New Relic visualisation supports development effortWhen Ocado rebuilt the frontend of some of its non-food
sites to become more customer-responsive, New Relic
Browser proved invaluable to the experience. ‘The general
trend we’re seeing is that code is moving from the backend
to the frontend’, says Thomas. ‘Most other solutions don’t
seem to take this into account, but New Relic Browser
enables us to see what’s actually happening within our customers’ browsers. It
gives us confidence that we are building solutions which work for our customers
in the real world, and that if they don’t, we’ll know about it straightaway. You
can’t get this kind of insight just from looking at your server logs.’
The combined data from New Relic APM and Browser has been used to highlight
performance issues, and identify where problems originate so they can be addressed.
With the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform, we feel prepared to take on these challenges and deliver on our motto “shopping made easy” to provide the superior customer experience we are best known for.
Peter ThomasHead of E-Commerce OSP, Ocado Technology
Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic
© Copyright 2017, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 07.2017
New Relic Insights, meanwhile, delivered solid ROI in one of Ocado’s warehouses.
These highly automated customer fulfilment centres pack and ship more than
one million items a day from a stock of over 50,000 different grocery items. A
part of the warehouse suffered a broken sensor that was reporting an exception,
even when this wasn’t accurate. The systems are event-driven so without counting
the frequency of these exceptions Ocado had no way of identifying this issue.
Through the power of New Relic Insights, alerts, and visualisation, the issue was
quickly identified and passed over to engineering for fixing. The storage capacity,
which was lost due to the error, is worth £35,000 per year in real labour costs. It
showed Ocado the potential for making incremental gains through the New Relic
Digital Intelligence Platform. Overall, improving automation and monitoring
capabilities with New Relic has realised a savings of £100,000 per year.
Thomas concludes: ‘The world is changing fast and the relentless growth of online
shopping is powered by improved technology, faster broadband, and better
mobile devices. With the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform, we feel prepared
to take on these challenges and deliver on our motto “shopping made easy” to
provide the superior customer experience we are best known for.’
Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic