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| Precise Helps UK Grocer Waitrose Keep a Lid on IT Costs Precise has announced that employee-owned retailer Waitrose, which delivers groceries to consumer homes from around half of its 206 UK stores, is using Precise to maintain the performance and availability of its e-commerce IT infrastructure. Waitrose held a strategic IT planning exercise last year, ahead of the critical Christmas trading period. This revealed that the retailer would need to increase server capacity by 30-40% to meet increased customer demand. This year the challenge for the food retailer increased because it recently made its "Waitrose Deliver" service free for most orders, meaning it receives a larger numbers of web customer visits all year round. By using Precise to pinpoint areas for performance improvement, instead of completely replacing its existing IT assets, the retailer is confident that it will be able to achieve better transaction throughput without massive cost increases. The Waitrose team targeted the under-performing SQL statements in its IBM-based e-commerce system and used Precise's deep-dive abilities to find ways to reduce the amount of processing power needed. Precise's Performance Management Database (PMDB) also helped Waitrose with capacity planning. This is vital, as during the busy holiday periods, Waitrose Deliver successfully handles as many as 50,000 simultaneous web page views. write your comments about the article :: © 2009 Computing News :: home page |