How Unilever Benefitted by Transforming into Cloud-Based Digital-Market Empire
Hello, readers. Today, in this post, we will see a case study about how a company, Unilever, changed its dynamic in the era of new technology and started using AWS cloud-based services for the process of digital marketing. How they shifted from on-premise data storage to cloud infrastructure implementation.
In- brief about Unilever's Heritage
Unilever was formed in 1930 by the merger of Dutch margarine producer, Margarine Unie, and British soap maker, Lever Brothers. Today, the consumer goods giant sells food, home care, refreshments, and personal care products in over 190 countries. Unilever has headquarters in London, United Kingdom, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and subsidiaries in over 90 countries. The company employs more than 170,000 people. In 2012, Unilever reported more than €51 billion in revenue.
The New Change
The idea started with Unilever
North America in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey needing to re-design its
infrastructure to support Unilever’s digital marketing approach. Unilever in
general previously used on-premises data centers to host its web
properties, all of which had different technologies and processes. The time was
to standardize the environment that would support faster time to market. The
company used to optimize its model, by testing a marketing campaign in a pilot
country and if the campaign got successful, the company would deploy it to
other countries and regions.
But, IT now wanted to speed up this process, by implementing the cloud on the
same concept.
Why Amazon Web Services
After a comprehensive RFP and review process involving more than 16 companies,
Unilever chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). Unilever’s priorities were in
choosing a digital marketing platform that included flexibility, a global
infrastructure, technology, as well as a rich ecosystem of members.
Implementation
The Unilever IT team had two goals for the AWS migration: deliver a common
technology platform for websites with regional content delivery architecture,
and migrate existing web properties to the cloud. To develop the platform,
Unilever attended an AWS workshop to design the architecture. Then the DMS team
built a pilot platform (a disaster recovery site for third-party hosting in
Miami) for stakeholder review. After obtaining business approval, Unilever
chose CSS Corporation, an Advanced Consulting Partner member of the Amazon
Partner Network (APN), for system integration and application development. The
DMS team worked with CSS to develop a global content management system (CMS)
.
For disaster recovery, Unilever stored backup data, snapshots, product and
recipe media files in Amazon
Simple Storage Service (Amazon
S3), and used EBS Snapshot Copy to copy Amazon
Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
snapshots from the US East (Northern Virginia) Region to the US West (Northern
California) Region.
Unilever and CSS created Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Windows and Linux
for use on approximately 400 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
instances. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) provides flexibility for
deployments and access to the Internet.
To migrate its web properties to the cloud, Unilever built pre-production and
production environments on AWS for several existing websites. Once Unilever’s
creative and production agencies certified the website in the pre-production
environment, Unilever switched the DNS address for the production environment to go
live on AWS. After a successful pilot launch, Unilever migrated more than
500 web properties from its data centers to AWS in less than five months. Since
then, Unilever has more than 1,700 web properties running on AWS worldwide.
Benefits of switching to AWS
For Unilever, moving to the AWS Cloud improved business agility and operational efficiency. “Previously, requesting a website for a marketing campaign was a lengthy process,” says Sreenivas Yalamanchili, Digital Marketing Services (DMS) Global Technical Manager. “By using AWS, we improved the time to launch for a digital marketing campaign from two weeks to an average of two days. That’s more than seven times faster than our traditional environment. If a brand manager has an idea, he or she can implement it before the competition,”
“Using AWS saves us time,” he continues. “I can simply go to the AWS website and plugin numbers to calculate costs. That makes it easy for me to set up a standard billing model for websites. It takes our partner, CSS, less than 12 hours to calculate pricing for a campaign website. I can comfortably say to my marketing folks that we have the capacity for anything we want to do. We can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.”
“The other advantage is the responsiveness of the AWS Cloud,” says Yalamanchili. “By using AWS, one of the brand managers was able to completely alter a campaign within 24 hours, which wouldn’t happen with the physical infrastructure.”
“AWS listens to us and helps come up with ideas to do things differently that are beneficial,” says Morgan. “I really enjoy the rapid rate of innovation from AWS.” Yalamanchili adds, “With AWS, it’s the customer's way, always. AWS has proved to us that it's the customer that matters by listening to us and innovating products and services."
I hope the case study was informative. Thanks for Reading!Source for case study - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/unilever/
But, IT now wanted to speed up this process, by implementing the cloud on the same concept.
Why Amazon Web Services
After a comprehensive RFP and review process involving more than 16 companies, Unilever chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). Unilever’s priorities were in choosing a digital marketing platform that included flexibility, a global infrastructure, technology, as well as a rich ecosystem of members.
Implementation
The Unilever IT team had two goals for the AWS migration: deliver a common technology platform for websites with regional content delivery architecture, and migrate existing web properties to the cloud. To develop the platform, Unilever attended an AWS workshop to design the architecture. Then the DMS team built a pilot platform (a disaster recovery site for third-party hosting in Miami) for stakeholder review. After obtaining business approval, Unilever chose CSS Corporation, an Advanced Consulting Partner member of the Amazon Partner Network (APN), for system integration and application development. The DMS team worked with CSS to develop a global content management system (CMS) .
For disaster recovery, Unilever stored backup data, snapshots, product and recipe media files in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and used EBS Snapshot Copy to copy Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots from the US East (Northern Virginia) Region to the US West (Northern California) Region.
Unilever and CSS created Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Windows and Linux for use on approximately 400 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) provides flexibility for deployments and access to the Internet.
To migrate its web properties to the cloud, Unilever built pre-production and production environments on AWS for several existing websites. Once Unilever’s creative and production agencies certified the website in the pre-production environment, Unilever switched the DNS address for the production environment to go live on AWS. After a successful pilot launch, Unilever migrated more than 500 web properties from its data centers to AWS in less than five months. Since then, Unilever has more than 1,700 web properties running on AWS worldwide.
For Unilever, moving to the AWS Cloud improved business agility and operational efficiency. “Previously, requesting a website for a marketing campaign was a lengthy process,” says Sreenivas Yalamanchili, Digital Marketing Services (DMS) Global Technical Manager. “By using AWS, we improved the time to launch for a digital marketing campaign from two weeks to an average of two days. That’s more than seven times faster than our traditional environment. If a brand manager has an idea, he or she can implement it before the competition,”
“Using AWS saves us time,” he continues. “I can simply go to the AWS website and plugin numbers to calculate costs. That makes it easy for me to set up a standard billing model for websites. It takes our partner, CSS, less than 12 hours to calculate pricing for a campaign website. I can comfortably say to my marketing folks that we have the capacity for anything we want to do. We can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.”
“The other advantage is the responsiveness of the AWS Cloud,” says Yalamanchili. “By using AWS, one of the brand managers was able to completely alter a campaign within 24 hours, which wouldn’t happen with the physical infrastructure.”
“AWS listens to us and helps come up with ideas to do things differently that are beneficial,” says Morgan. “I really enjoy the rapid rate of innovation from AWS.” Yalamanchili adds, “With AWS, it’s the customer's way, always. AWS has proved to us that it's the customer that matters by listening to us and innovating products and services."
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