Macquarie Telecom
How Roses Only Met Valentine’s Day Demand
- 20th February
- Grant Arnott 209
For anyone in the floral business, February 14 is the busiest day of the year. When you’re Australia’s leading online floral retailer, performance and uptime is crucial. Here’s how Roses Only kept the romance alive on Valentine’s Day and beyond.
The Roses Only Group implemented Macquarie Telecom‘s Managed Hosting Services in preparation for peak demand and a rush of online romantics during this year’s Valentine’s Day rush.
Formed in 1995, Roses Only is part of a family owned business that brings together almost 40 years of retail and floristry experience. Despite having only three retail outlets, The Roses Only Group is Australia’s leading floral retailer and also includes Fruit Only, Sparkling Only and its newest brand Hampers Only. The Roses Only Group has experienced year on year growth of 10 percent, largely through online sales, which comprise 70 percent of the company’s business.
With a significant proportion of its annual sales revenue derived from Valentine’s Day and the days preceding, the Roses Only Group has to apply significant firepower to its hosting to keep up with the spike in demand. An outage would be catastrophic – not only in terms of millions in lost revenue, but the suffering of thousands of Aussie Romeos would be on their hands.
As part of the implementation, Macquarie Telecom’s Managed Hosting solution centres around a fully managed high availability server hosting environment, utilising shared SAN and shared load balancing, in addition to dedicated high availability firewalls and a security environment with highest-level ISO27001 and ASIO T4 certification. The Roses Only infrastructure, hosted in Macquarie Telecom’s fully certified and fully redundant Intellicentre data centre, enables the Roses Only Group to manage its increasing website traffic, particularly during peak periods with significant jumps in operational workload.
“Macquarie Telecom has a strong reputation for managing mission critical technology and websites that have highly transactional websites, with sometimes unpredictable demand,” says Michael Seder, Innovations Officer, Roses Only Group. “Given the need to meet peak demand during events such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas, we needed a solution which would support this volume of customers during peak periods and provide us with the scalability to allow for our general future growth. We are pleased with the implementation and have already seen significant benefits in our business.”
The solution offers the ability to burst infrastructure on demand and also allows the company to monitor the health of the hosted platform through the use of Macquarie Telecom’s self management tool, InView, a real time visibility tool.
“A key requirement was that we needed a solution that offered strong management tools, allowing us to increase management of the site and data network performance, and review its health on a minute by minute basis. The type of visibility offered by InView allows us to make better business decisions, both now and in the future,” says Michael Seder.
Roses Only is another win for Macquarie Telecom, who also recently announced that News Limited would become a tenant in Macquarie Telecom’s Intellicentre 2, a $60 million state-of-the-art facility in North Ryde designed to meet critical quality standards including ASIO T4 ‘Intruder Resistant’, Defence Signals Directorate Gateway certification, and Payment Card Industry certification. News Limited is currently hosted at the original Intellicentre in Sydney’s CBD, with Intellicentre 2 set to come online in the first half of this year. As Australia moves into the digital age and prepares for the National Broadband Network, Macquarie Telecom is investing significantly in infrastructure to support high demand hosting and security compliance requirements.
