IVIS Group Helps Tesco.com Break Internet Records

Cutover to new site system boosts online orders

2 October 2000 - Leading e-commerce consultant IVIS Group has recently completed a new project with the in-house teams at Tesco.com which has significantly streamlined and refined the "behind the scenes" e-commerce engine of its web site. The results have been dramatic - the Tesco website is now handling all-time record levels of trading. During peak processing Tesco.com takes over 1500 orders per hour- representing over £5m per week, which makes it by far the largest grocery home shopping business in the world.

The new system, called TIS 2000, is a key part of Tesco's web strategy to enable the retailer's site to handle increased levels of traffic and improve customer access and response times. TIS 2000 was developed in close partnership with specialist consultant IVIS and has now been running for two months without problems. Tesco management reports that the new system is comfortably handling a substantial increase in transactions and has delivered big improvements in online response times for its customers.

Mike McNamara, Tesco.com's Chief Technology Officer comments: "Since the relaunch of Tesco.com two months ago, customer response times have halved and pure on-line revenues have doubled. IVIS were instrumental in the redesign and build of the new website and I am indebted to them for their skills, dedication and commitment."

The recent successful cutover to TIS 2000 implements changes which, although largely invisible to the end user, significantly streamline and speed up the site.

This has been achieved by:

- re-engineering state management
- introducing asynchronous XML processing and
- completely restructuring the basket management process on the site to make it faster and increase its capacity to handle even more traffic online.

Qusai Sarraf, CEO of IVIS Group adds: "As e-commerce traffic reaches unprecedented levels on sites like Tesco.com, the web infrastructure industry is faced with new challenges. Because the volume of traffic through Tesco.com is so high we've had to think out of the box and innovate to keep their web engineering one step ahead of customer demand."