Zulily
Accelerating eCommerce
Seattle-based Zulily has rapidly become an eCommerce industry darling thanks to a brilliant business strategy, company culture that embraces speed, and willingness to fully embrace cloud economics. Zulily reached its first $1 billion in annual revenue with only Amazon and Old Navy hitting that mark faster.
“Between pure colocation, cloud services and a myriad of hybrid solutions, data center hosting has become a complex space to navigate. How and where to host services is an intimidating and potentially revenue-impacting decision. I rely on Avail Partners and their unique engagement model to help me distill fact and reality from hype. Based on information provided by Avail, we secured 20% savings from current service vendors while gaining insight on the negotiation of data center hosting.”
Challenge
Explosive growth challenged Zulily’s veteran leadership to develop and execute a nextgeneration hosting strategy. They sought a solution to accommodate their rapid scale, complexity and the unique technology needs of multiple application teams. Further, their planned IPO required confidential due diligence of multiple vendors who would best serve their business in the future.
Approach
Avail first spent weeks with leadership and the application team leads to fully understand their needs, knowing that in an extremely complex environment they’d have unique requirements. The new hosting infrastructure would have to support them in customized ways and still be able to take advantage of cloud economics. Client confidentiality would be paramount too, allowing Zulily to remain anonymous throughout a multi-vendor due-diligence process.
Services
Technology Roadmap
Application Workshops and requirements gathering
Due Diligence via Market Intelligence Assessment
Solutions Architecture
Proposal Management
Results
After reaching its first $1 billion in annual revenue, Zulily launched an extremely successful IPO and now leverages their new solution to support millions of customers daily. Their hosting strategy supports their continued growth of millions of new customers each month. Avail provided Zulily the tools to better plan, navigate and negotiate future growth. In 90 days, Avail was able to:
Secure savings of 20% over previous hosting model
Ensure client confidentiality while preparing IPO
Achieve flexibility and massive scaling via cloud economic model
Establish a hosting strategy to address technical complexity