Sawiday, Dutch supplier of bathroom fixtures, is growing fast. Alongside its thirteen physical showrooms full of inspiration and ideas, the powerhouse of the company is its webshops (with sanitairwinkel.nl a veritable institution on the Dutch market). To help it cope with periods of peak demand and support the company’s international expansion, Sawiday called on Amazon Web Services specialist inQdo. AWS gives Sawiday what it needs to focus on the speed, scalability and flexibility of its IT environment.
Osman Yucekaya is IT Manager at Sawiday, and eight years ago was one of the first to see the potential that the AWS cloud could offer to Sawiday. “At that time, the cloud was still relatively new and the offerings fairly limited. But AWS did exist – they were really in the vanguard of cloud computing. And they still are. That innovative perspective and the potential always intrigued me.” Working with partner inQdo, Sawiday migrated its existing IT environment, which was hosted on-premise, to the AWS cloud. “The scalability of the solution was always a major decisive factor. Now, we can move extra capacity to where we need it in a matter of seconds. Before, that was something that would take months.”
Architecture check for security and BI
Sawiday has seen tremendous growth over the past two years. “During the pandemic, a lot of people took to renovation projects, and that meant that the demand for bathroom fixtures rose. Before, we had been seeing growth of around thirty per cent per year, but at that point it shot up to nearly 70%.” To keep up with that growth they needed to fine-tune the IT environment. Peter Perebooms, founder of AWS specialist inQdo, takes over the story: “We took a good, hard look at the environment, which at that point had been running at Sawiday for a few years, to see where savings were possible and where improvements could be made. That meant things like looking at the architecture, but also considering standardization in security and the potential of business intelligence, data lakes and machine learning.”
‘If our webshops are ever not available, we can just pack up and go home’
Significant savings per month
After inQdo fine-tuned the cloud environment to meet Sawiday’s needs, the company started saving thousands of euros every month. “inQdo helped us adjust the configuration so that we were only paying for the things we were really using,” says Yucekaya. “But there were a lot of smart little tricks in things like data transfer and storage that brought our monthly costs down a lot.” With improvements on the security side, the AWS specialist also made sure that the Sawiday systems now stay up day and night. “Before, storage was a bottleneck there,” Yucekaya says. “With AWS we can set all that up ourselves, whereas previously we had to rely on the security of a traditional hosting party.” With a view to the future, inQdo also took a close look at aspects like data recovery and compliance management to make sure that Sawiday was not running any unnecessary risks. “If our webshops are ever not available, we can just pack up and go home,” says Yucekaya. “Luckily, since we started with AWS we’ve never had any unexpected downtime.”
International expansion
Along with being active in the Netherlands and Belgium, Sawiday has a webshop in France, where it will also be opening physical showrooms in the coming years. The goal is to make Sawiday a Europe-wide brand. “The big strength of AWS is that it is in itself an international company. That means that when we open a branch in southern Europe, we can make sure that we are using servers in the region. That keeps the latency low by putting us close to our users,” says Yucekaya. “Plus it offers convenience and speed because we don’t have to look for a local, traditional hosting party.”
Scalable fast and flexibly
The benefits of being able to expand capacity fast are also felt internally. “We’re working on building an environment where our people in the business can do certain kinds of testing. We can have the capacity we need for that up and running in seconds, whereas in the past, with our traditional hosting party, that would have taken weeks,” says Yucekaya. inQdo urges its customers to stick as closely to the Amazon best practices as possible. “We advise our clients to look around at all the options that Amazon offers, so that they can keep improving their business and their processes,” says Perebooms. This was, in a nutshell, very much what inQdo’s role in optimizing Sawiday’s AWS environment was. “Their specific knowledge and expertise in the environment showed us how to get much more out of our AWS environment,” says Yucekaya. “We can focus on growth and expansion without having to worry about scalability. Because that’s simply taken care of.”
Advantages achieved:
– Savings of thousands of euros per month
– Faster scaling of capacity in peak periods
– Better security than the traditional environment