In a bid to boost flexibility and better manage demand surges, online home furnishing retailer Wayfair has migrated its entire data operations to the cloud.
The retailer previously had a hybrid cloud strategy but has now moved to a unified public cloud strategy based on Google Cloud, according to a Tuesday (Oct. 11) press release.
“The complete migration of our data center operations to Google Cloud is an essential part of ensuring Wayfair’s long-term competitiveness and resilience,” Wayfair Chief Technology Officer Fiona Tan said in the release. “With this partnership, we’re better able to handle sudden traffic, empower our engineers with more autonomy, and use [artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)] to create a better shopping experience for our customers.”
Having migrated fully to the cloud, Wayfair can now better handle heavy web traffic during sales and other key events, more quicky deploy fraud and scam detection solutions, use more ML models to understand customer preferences and personalize interactions, and equip its developers with more tools and data to create solutions for customers, according to the press release.
In addition, using Google Cloud AI, Wayfair has created models that use visitors’ onsite journeys and purchase histories to identify professional customers and thereby increase B2B orders, the release stated.
“Being data-driven and agile is synonymous with retail sales success, and technology is the key to unlocking these capabilities,” Google Cloud Vice President of Retail and Consumer Solutions Carrie Tharp said in the release. “Wayfair is on the leading edge of retail, and at every stage of our partnership, we’ve seen them tackle new and bold technology efforts that ultimately delight their customers with better shopping experiences.”
As PYMNTS reported in July, Google Cloud has seen growth across the Google Cloud Platform and Workspace, with sales up nearly 35% year over year during the quarter ended June 30.
Read more: Demand for Amazon, Google’s Cloud Offerings Spotlights Connected Economy’s Unstoppable Rise
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said July 26 during the company’s quarterly earnings call that corporates are embracing the cloud because “we unify data lakes, data warehouses, data governance and advanced machine learning into a single platform that can analyze data across any cloud.”
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