The Ocado founders were way ahead of their time when, back in 2000, they

started the UK’s only ‘pure play’ online grocery operator. Today Ocado is the

world’s largest dedicated online grocery supermarket, exceeding £1 billion in

annual sales. Developing the innovative software and systems that power the

online retail business is Ocado Technology, a division of software developers,

engineers, researchers, and scientists spread across five offices: Hatfield (UK),

Wroclaw and Krakow (Poland), Sofia (Bulgaria), and Barcelona (Spain).

Ocado delivers happiness when its drivers trudge through the snow delivering

Christmas orders; indeed, this going-the-extra-mile attitude is what keeps its

600,000 customers coming back for more. But when you consider the Ocado

motto ‘shopping made easy’, there is nothing easy about delivering on that

promise. In a mind-bogglingly complex process, a typical Ocado warehouse

packs and ships more than one million items each day, supported through a

technology platform built in house. Additionally, the Ocado family now also

includes Fetch (a specialist online pet store) and Sizzle (homeware), both

firmly based on the technology platform built by Ocado Technology. Recent

e-commerce sites such as Morrisons and Fabled, a beauty destination site

in partnership with Marie Claire, are more recent success stories for Ocado

Technology.

In parallel, Ocado Technology is also developing the Ocado Smart Platform

(OSP), an end-to-end e-commerce solution designed to put other brick-and-

mortar retailers around the world online. From its user-friendly mobile apps and

webshop to highly efficient automated warehouse technology, OSP offers

superior customer experience and a highly efficient end-to-end supply chain solution.

Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic

INDUSTRYRetail

LOCATIONHatfield, UK

EMPLOYEESOver 12,000

USE CASEMigrate the Ocado Smart Platform to

the cloud and gain full-stack visibility

so that any performance issues can

be identified and addressed before

they impact customer experience.

PRODUCTS USEDNew Relic APM, New Relic Browser,

New Relic Synthetics, and New Relic

Insights

WHY NEW RELICPowerful visualisation capabilities,

insight into the customer’s browser

experience, and effective out-of-the-

box team collaboration

HIGHLIGHTS• Increased confidence in cloud

migration and development

projects

• Improved team collaboration across

1,000 geographically dispersed

developers, operations, and other

technical functions

• Quickly identified performance

bottlenecks, reducing costs

• Delivered annual cost savings of

£100,000

Customer Case Study

Ocado now offers OSP as a managed service capability to partners internationally,

enabling them to build sustainable, scalable, and profitable online grocery

businesses in their own markets.

Cloud move demands increased visibilityIn 2014 Ocado found itself in a transitional period. Demands on its business were

increasing and Ocado felt that a move to a cloud infrastructure would give the

company more flexibility and scalability. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen

as the target environment.

Peter Thomas, head of E-Commerce OSP at Ocado Technology, shares his insight:

‘One of the challenges was that the dashboards we had developed to monitor

the various sites and the platform behind it were not compatible with AWS and

needed to be replaced. I had used New Relic technology before and wondered if

that might be our answer.’

New Relic’s Digital Intelligence Platform was introduced to

support the cloud migration, including integrating well over

100 microservice applications into the OSP platform. New

Relic acted very much as a ‘security blanket,’ as Thomas

termed it: ‘New Relic APM provided the extra visibility into

our systems and platforms, which we needed. It gave us

confidence that our migration was going as expected, and,

if not, we were in a very good position to address any issues

early. We learned lots about cloud architecture, and it was

great having New Relic there to reassure us nothing was

quietly going wrong behind the scenes.’

New Relic became more pervasive within Ocado and is now

often used to pinpoint the root cause of any performance

issues. A notable example was when one of the OSP backend

systems showed a gradual performance degradation that

was in danger of impacting customer orders. Customer

satisfaction is vitally important for Ocado, and a lot of effort

was spent on finding out what was wrong. Confusingly, different systems that

were seemingly unconnected were affected. It wasn’t until an engineer used New

Relic Insights to represent the problem that it became clear that although the

database systems were all different, they were hosted on the same physical

machine, which was the root cause of the problem.

New Relic Browser enables us to see what’s actually happening within our customers’ browsers. It gives us confidence that we are building solutions which work for our customers in the real world.

Peter ThomasHead of E-Commerce OSP, Ocado Technology

Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic

‘New Relic made it easy for us to visualise and track this issue in real time’, says

Thomas. ‘It helped resolve this particular problem a lot faster than we could

otherwise have done.’

Better collaboration for a better customer experienceOcado Technology works with a globally distributed team of 1,000 developers,

all working on different parts of the estate simultaneously. New Relic is used to

provide a central overview and a common communication tool. Thomas loves

that the features to enable this effective team collaboration come straight out

of the box with New Relic: ‘We’ve tried other products which needed a lot of

configuration. As soon as you start customising the solution with so many teams,

it becomes very difficult to manage and maintain. New Relic did an excellent job

at giving us some very sensible defaults which we could easily build on.’

It wasn’t just the internal collaboration that made New Relic

a success within Ocado; the New Relic team itself took an

active interest in how Ocado used the toolset. A centre of

excellence was introduced, consisting of New Relic and

Ocado experts. As a team, they discuss the New Relic road

map and what other features could prove useful. Having that

deep insight into how OSP operates has enabled this team to

really add value to Ocado.

New Relic visualisation supports development effortWhen Ocado rebuilt the frontend of some of its non-food

sites to become more customer-responsive, New Relic

Browser proved invaluable to the experience. ‘The general

trend we’re seeing is that code is moving from the backend

to the frontend’, says Thomas. ‘Most other solutions don’t

seem to take this into account, but New Relic Browser

enables us to see what’s actually happening within our customers’ browsers. It

gives us confidence that we are building solutions which work for our customers

in the real world, and that if they don’t, we’ll know about it straightaway. You

can’t get this kind of insight just from looking at your server logs.’

The combined data from New Relic APM and Browser has been used to highlight

performance issues, and identify where problems originate so they can be addressed.

With the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform, we feel prepared to take on these challenges and deliver on our motto “shopping made easy” to provide the superior customer experience we are best known for.

Peter ThomasHead of E-Commerce OSP, Ocado Technology

Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic

© Copyright 2017, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 07.2017

New Relic Insights, meanwhile, delivered solid ROI in one of Ocado’s warehouses.

These highly automated customer fulfilment centres pack and ship more than

one million items a day from a stock of over 50,000 different grocery items. A

part of the warehouse suffered a broken sensor that was reporting an exception,

even when this wasn’t accurate. The systems are event-driven so without counting

the frequency of these exceptions Ocado had no way of identifying this issue.

Through the power of New Relic Insights, alerts, and visualisation, the issue was

quickly identified and passed over to engineering for fixing. The storage capacity,

which was lost due to the error, is worth £35,000 per year in real labour costs. It

showed Ocado the potential for making incremental gains through the New Relic

Digital Intelligence Platform. Overall, improving automation and monitoring

capabilities with New Relic has realised a savings of £100,000 per year.

Thomas concludes: ‘The world is changing fast and the relentless growth of online

shopping is powered by improved technology, faster broadband, and better

mobile devices. With the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform, we feel prepared

to take on these challenges and deliver on our motto “shopping made easy” to

provide the superior customer experience we are best known for.’

Ocado Changes the Face of Online Shopping with New Relic