Grupo LTM, the largest Brazilian company in the management of loyalty programs for the B2B segment, increased the volume of orders processed per second on the WebPrêmios portal from 50 to 250 by adopting the services of Azure, Microsoft's cloud. With the technology, the platform for redeeming products and experiences that serves 150 customers and 13 million participants ended the use of the on premises datacenter (used at full capacity only a few times a year) and significantly reduced infrastructure costs. In 2015, the company had revenues of R$ 570 million and the expectation is to increase this result by 30% this year.
WebPrêmios is a marketplace with an integrated design that offers an interactive experience to the participant, enabling the personalization of the catalog without the need for technical or intermediary involvement. Among its facilities are price comparison screens, single cart, tracking, navigation with fewer clicks, chat service and product cross-selling.
The system follows the current account concept, which enables different businesses such as: multiple origins, coalition points, sale of points, expiration of points, point without value, blocked points, debit and traceability (which makes fraud more difficult). WebPrêmios also offers exclusive products and tools for redeeming awards online and offline, which meet various needs of the relationship, incentive and loyalty programs. With more than 500,000 reward options, it offers attractive, relevant and positive customer experiences.
However, to manage all online orders, Grupo LTM could not have full visibility of the limits that the contracted datacenter offered for the peak period of their campaigns. According to the CTO of Grupo LTM, Marcelo Toledo, the company decided to migrate to the cloud in order to have the necessary tools to increase its performance during peaks of redemption of benefits, such as the end of the year, black friday and commemorative dates.
“Today, with Visual Studio running on Azure, we were able to perform stress and load tests, in addition to quickly scheduling our campaigns. Currently, we simulate all stages of product redemption from log-in to order closing, analyzing the behavior of Webprémios. This stream runs 250 times per second in the Microsoft cloud, a number comparable to e-commerce sites during Black Friday, ensuring our best performance when a campaign goes live. It was an increase in capacity of 500% that we won to offer the best experience to consumers”, says Marcelo Toledo.
Cost reduction and more campaigns
The CTO also comments on how the company managed to reduce infrastructure costs. “We adopted Azure to ensure horizontal scalability and high availability of services. Our biggest access demands happen seasonally, so our platform is idle most of the time. However, we paid for high processing power without using it fully. Microsoft's cloud gives us the option to pay only for what we use, offering elasticity and, above all, high capacity to withstand peak periods”, comments the CTO.
The director of Microsoft's Servers and Platforms Division, Roberto Prado, explains how the datacenter migration process that Grupo LTM used to Azure was, according to the needs that the project demanded, how to improve the performance of the B2B platform. “To start the change, we implemented the cloud as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), since the first objective was to reduce the effort with management and also the cost of the data center for the WebPrêmios. As a second step, we started the transition to Platform as a Service (PaaS), which is scheduled to end by December, among the dozens of resources used are API Management, Cache, Message Queue and SQL Server”, explains Prado.
Grupo LTM's new infrastructure also allowed for an increase in the number of loyalty campaigns carried out by WebPrêmios and more time for the IT team to dedicate to other critical business demands instead of concentrating on managing data center activities. “In 2015 we closed the year with 30 campaigns carried out and for this year our goal is to end with 40. In addition, part of our team now has the freedom to work with new businesses, since we are no longer concerned with monitoring datacenter performance ”, says Marcelo Toledo.
The executive also says that LTM recently signed a contract with a new client: Vivo, and once again, the agility and flexibility of designing a robust and high-performance environment was essential to support the operator's millions of users. “Without a doubt, Microsoft's technology helped us win new businesses and will support us in many more in the future”, adds Toledo.
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