No regrets over leaving the Amazon cloud, says Marks & Spencer

'We still have problems but now we can fix them; we always used to have problems but previously we couldn't fix them,' says M&S's Keith Goldthorpe

In 2012, under previous CIO Darrell Stein, retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) removed the e-commerce side of its business from the Amazon cloud, on which it had been hosted since 2007, and brought it back in house as part of a major development known as the Multi-channel Foundation Programme. The broad strategic aim of this programme was to expand the company's reach both in terms of geography and also the range of platforms covered.

The integration of communication channels such as phone, email and SMS with the order system, website and distribution facilities cost something in the region of £150m. Now completed, it integrates back-end, front-end, distribution and customer services systems, allowing in-house and outsourced customer call centres to access the full range of information when handling enquiries, bringing ordering and logistics closer together, as well as making the website more flexible to adapt to emerging mobile technologies.

Having built new distribution centres and back office ordering systems over the preceding two or three years, the online public face of M&S, the new website, was launched in February.

There were two key reasons for moving the website and associated systems away from Amazon. One was the fact that the e-commerce giant is a direct competitor to M&S, as Stein told Computing at the time, and the other was to bring control of the systems back in house, enabling the retailer to make adjustments without attracting a punitive overhead from Amazon.

Speaking recently, lead architect of information management Keith Goldthorpe, told Computing that regaining fine-grained control over core assets remains one of the major benefits of "insourcing" the e-commerce and call centre systems.

"The key thing is we are masters of our own destiny, we own the code. We still have problems but now we can fix them. We always used to have problems but previously we couldn't fix them."

Goldthorpe said M&S has not abandoned the cloud model completely, but rather that it now thinks more carefully about what should be in-house and what should be hosted externally.

"There will undoubtedly be a case for more cloud-based services, but we will keep our crown jewels [in house]. We will always want to have a strong degree of control over those things that are differentiators."

Bringing core systems in house has fostered significant changes within the IT department itself, enabling it to skill-up for the challenges posed by multi-channel web and social systems that need to scale and change rapidly.

With this in mind M&S hired a number of new in-house software engineers, as Computing revealed at the time. Meanwhile the department's core duties of maintaining core back-end systems, which in some cases are 30 years old and require a very different skill-set, remain.

"It's been transformative for M&S IT with the introduction of Agile and more in-house software engineering practices," Goldthorpe explained.

After eight years in the CIO role, Stein left M&S in the summer to become senior vice president for information services at consumer goods firm Reckitt Benckiser, his shoes being filled by Carl Dawson, who was previously at Tesco.

Asked what these changes at the top will mean for M&S's IT strategy, Goldthorpe refused to be drawn.

"Christmas is coming and that's a peak time for us. Any IT person coming in at this time of year will be focused on stability. If there are changes coming, I would expect to hear about them in the New Year," he said.