Supported rapid e-commerce growth to $2B in revenue

Full-stack observability to support cloud migration

Increased efficiency in identifying risks to secure and reliable application

Maximized digital customer experience

Optimized incident response, averting significant potential losses

Challenge

Ulta Beauty’s e-commerce channel grew from $200 million to over $2 billion. As their digital channels grew exponentially, so did their digital challenges.

Omar Koncobo, IT Director for E-commerce and Digital Systems for Ulta Beauty, joined the retailer ten years ago and, over that period, saw their e-commerce channel grow to over $2 billion today.

Exponential traffic spikes during holiday seasons meant building extra infrastructure for coverage in their on-premises environment and being overprovisioned for normal traffic the rest of the year. With this setup, the customer experience was compromised because of the difficulty of making changes — rollout times were very slow, contrasted with the need for rapid customization to improve customer experience (CX). Changing a single line of code meant having to deploy their whole stack.

To address these issues, Ulta Beauty decided to migrate to the cloud and take a microservices, API-first approach. They chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as their cloud provider. Ulta Beauty took a "strangler pattern" approach to their application migration, where they moved parts of their monolith to the cloud one microservice at a time, with load-balancing to ensure traffic and requests flowed correctly between the on-prem systems and the new GCP stack.

Running two systems during their migration journey, Ulta Beauty needed an observability solution to monitor the reliability and security of their new stack while ensuring business and application performance to avoid any revenue drop-offs. Ulta Beauty's engineers knew they needed the right vendors to help them through the massive shift. Ideally, these strategic partners would ensure their team adopted the best practices and established the correct patterns as they modernized workflows while staying on track with their revenue goals.

Solution

Ulta Beauty's engineers chose Sumo Logic as their strategic partner for full-stack observability. Sumo Logic's cloud-native SaaS analytics platform provides comprehensive visibility into their systems and actionable real-time insights tailored to their business goals.

With the ability to scale as they migrate servers to GCP, Sumo Logic provides Ulta Beauty with the needed monitoring features to ensure the reliability and security of their stack, as well as provide robust dashboarding to monitor business and application performance.

The Ulta Beauty team can now focus on application delivery, freed from infrastructure maintenance.

Headshot Quote Ulta

If you are migrating a legacy system to this new platform, you need to be mindful of the revenue that you need to protect. By moving from the old to the new, you shouldn't be seeing a dip. With your improvement, your numbers should be showing that.”

Omar Koncobo

IT Director for Ecommerce and Digital Systems

Results

Protecting revenue while migrating to the cloud is top of mind for Ulta Beauty – issues must be identified and addressed quickly. Sumo Logic's robust data visualization features allow Ulta Beauty to create dashboards that provide a comprehensive view of various aspects of their business. With Sumo Logic's out-of-the-box dashboarding capabilities, Ulta Beauty's e-commerce and digital systems team and other stakeholders in the company can better visualize data and quickly identify operational, reliability and security issues.

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