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dotdigital Group plc, the leading ‘SaaS’ provider of an omnichannel marketing automation and customer engagement platform, partner with GGR Communications to upgrade their network infrastructure from 1GB to 10GB, with lightening speed and minimal down-time.

Business & Technical Objectives

Whilst experiencing a huge increase in email sending of over 30% every year and continuing to provide first class support to more than 80,000 customers across more than 6,000 brands, Steve Shaw CTO at dotdigital, knew they needed to upgrade their network infrastructure from 1GB to 10GB and improve on their connectivity to Azure in order to increase throughput to deliver more emails, faster.

There was also a need to deploy a Big Data network infrastructure for the storage of customer insight data, which could be replicated across other sending node platforms in the US and Asia Pacific, providing sophisticated failover and load balancing functionality.

With high profile customers such as Barbour, Tui and DHL and with Black Friday fast-approaching, both projects needed to be delivered skilfully but quickly, with minimal downtime.

Solutions

Industry experts, GGR Communications, were called upon to design, project-manage, implement and optimise dotdigital’s whole platform infrastructure, with minimal disruption and downtime. GGR deployed innovative Cisco hardware, offering the latest capabilities in threat defence, such as Cisco Firepower® firewalls, providing advanced threat analysis/protection before, during, and after attacks, and the very latest Nexus data centre switches, allowing secure connectivity to dotmailer’s internal infrastructure. GGR upgraded the existing hardware and WAN solution to support 10GB connectivity, providing dotmailer with the enhanced connectivity and support to their Azure platform that they needed. Implementation was very smooth. Once the recommended hardware had been procured, GGR set up a full lab environment to ensure that the hardware could meet its intended purpose. This involved many man-hours, ensuring dotmailer’s specific configuration settings from the original design were replicated on the new setup and rigorously tested, before the proposed migration and live date.

Results

  • A Black Friday record – Over 105 million emails sent on just one day alone in November 2017, an increase of 30% on the previous year
  • For Black Friday 2018, there was a further increase to 121 million emails sent over the course of one day
  • The dramatic increase in emails still only uses 20-30% of current capacity, allowing dotdigital to significantly expand the business without the fear of maxing out during peak delivery times
  • Decrease in average mail delivery time due to the increased capacity of both the new hardware and data circuits
  • 10% increase in end-to-end bandwidth capability

Reason for Choosing GGR Communications

Steve Shaw, CTO at dotdigital, was aware of GGR’s expertise and professionalism through a previous project, and therefore knew that they could be relied upon to ensure that any project they undertook would progress swiftly and successfully.

Providing first-class support to their customers is imperative to GGR Communications and has been so for nearly 25 years. Their Cisco accredited team of engineers spent a lot of time with the key stakeholders at dotdigital to ensure that the design, schedule and management of the project would achieve their objectives. The new solution had been several months at the planning stage and due to the relationship between GGR and dotdigital, other suppliers were not considered.

“GGR implemented the original solution with upmost expertise and detail, so we saw no reason to look elsewhere. The buying process via GGR was very smooth; being a partner of our chosen hardware supplier, GGR were able to negotiate the best price possible to fit within the budgetary figures provided.”

Future Plans

GGR’s expertise have enabled dotdigital to continue to develop their platform with in-region data processing and storage through cloud infrastructure in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. And, as the business continues to grow in these areas, then they will look to implement a similar solution within these regions.

After achieving phenomenal Black Friday 2017 results, where the number of emails increased by 25 million with minimal sending time, it demonstrated to dotdigital, that the platform was able to easily handle the increase, providing them with the knowledge that they now had a scalable and future-proof network infrastructure.

“Our customer’s email volume is staggering, with 30 – 40% volume increase year on year. We are incredibly pleased with the infrastructure solution designed and implemented by GGR Communications, which will enable us to continue to grow.”

The Benefits

  • Increased security, speed and reliability for dotdigital and their customers
  • A more stable solution with zero downtime
  • Enables faster email delivery
  • The design, deployed in the UK, is scalable to other sending nodes in the US and Asia Pacific
  • 24/7 UK service and support
  • Ongoing professional advice and expertise
  • Improved monitoring and auditability, providing them with peace of mind and allowing them to plot trends and plan future projects
  • GGR is helping dotmailer achieve their long-term business objectives by optimising their network, achieving real value for money and in turn, profitable results

 

“GGR’s customer support resources have proven to be very responsive and knowledgeable. We continuously work with the teams at GGR, both from the dotdigital platform side, and from our own internal Corporate IT Department. Both teams always find GGR will come up with the appropriate solution to the scenario given to them.”
Steve Shaw, CTO, dotdigital Group plc

SUMMARY

The Customer:

dotdigital Group plc

The Challenge:

Segregating production and corporate/ internal networks. Data centre for next generation Azure hybrid infrastructure.

The Solution:

Architecture review resulting in redesign and replacement of core network devices and a complete network overhaul with Cisco best of breed.

The Results:

Migration to a hybrid cloud model, streamlined scalability process, platform is quicker and more stable, enabling faster email delivery. Global expansion of architecture.