Waitrose looks to IT to keep its business fresh

Waitrose is looking into deplying thin clients

Waitrose is gearing up to face the competition in online grocery shopping with a relaunch of its e-commerce platform planned for this Easter.

The firm’s existing transactional web site, developed in the early 2000s, is being totally re-engineered as a flexible base to enable new features.

IBM’s WebSphere e-commerce suite is at the heart of the new web site, while Indian IT supplier Infosys is helping the company’s in-house team with testing and development.

“[The web site] won’t be hugely different in terms of capability from the start, but what we are doing is providing a platform to lots of other developments – we want to bring it up to date and get it ready to add other things on top,” said systems director Kevin Berry.

“It is quite a big deal to completely change your e-commerce systems, as you can’t do it very often. So now we will have a great platform to build upon,” said Berry.

“This year, the challenge is to get the new web site launched. [Other web features] will depend on the priority we give them in relation to all the other new things we need to do, [in addition to] keeping things running and controlling costs,” he said.

Oracle white paper download: learn why more and more organisations are using SOA as the basis for their future IT needs

A key reason for the revamp is the stiffening competition in the online food retail market. Waitrose’s rival Tesco already has a well-established online operation, which exceeded £1bn in sales over the first half of 2009. And Sainsbury’s is ploughing cash into enhancements for its web site, which began offering non-food products last summer.

But despite the size of the project, Waitrose says the work is well within its infrastructure capabilities because of the incremental approach it is taking. However, it is seeing a substantial increase in the amount of data that has to be stored and managed.

“The growth of physical branches and bigger product assortments meant we had to scale up. But our infrastructure has been remarkably scalable, and we are very alert to the fact that the business is growing fast, which has the potential to create bottlenecks, though we haven’t had any yet,” said Berry.