WIXLIB

ANALYSISHomeNewsWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisationDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntimeFor Atwal, Windows 10 ticks all the boxes across the enterpriseIT environment, which means there is no financial reason to moveaway. One of the biggest benefits, but also potentially the mostdisruptive for enterprise IT, is the fact that Microsoft takes chargeof updating the Windows 10 OS environment, in effect becomingthe outsource provider for keeping the OS fully patched.In the past, application compatibility has been the biggest challenge facing IT departments when rolling out a new Windowsoperating system. Microsoft wrote in a document published inSeptember 2018: “Whereas compatibility was previously a concern for organisations upgrading to a new version of Windows,Windows 10 is compatible with most hardware and softwarecapable of running on Windows 7 or later.”Service updatesMicrosoft has introduced the concept of service channels thatenable IT departments to decide how quickly updates aredeployed, claiming these channels allow customers to designate how frequently their individual devices are updated.“An organisation may have test devices that the IT department can update with new features as soon as possible, and thenspecialised devices that require a longer feature update cycle toensure continuity,” the company said.Users on the Windows Insider Programme get the latest updatesimmediately, but most users are likely to be on the Semi-AnnualChannel, getting Windows 10 updates in March and October.Microsoft also provides a Long-Term Servicing Channel, wherenew features are released every two to three years. It recommendsthis channel for use only on specialist devices, such as medicalequipment, that typically do not run Office, but IT departmentsthat are not in a position to entrust desktop Windows updating toMicrosoft could choose this channel over semi-annual updates.The issue of Windows updates breaking the operating systemwas highlighted during the roll-out of the October 2018 Windows10 update. Microsoft had to suspend the release following a spateof reports of users’ files disappearing.“Once firms are on Windows 10,they will need to continuouslyupdate their systems”Dan Vetras, KollectiveWhichever route IT departments choose, once the organisation is on Windows 10, it will be Microsoft, not the internal ITdepartment, that ultimately controls updates. “Once firms are onWindows 10, they will need to continuously update their systemsas part of Microsoft’s new ‘Windows as a service’ model,” saidKollective CEO Dan Vetras. “This means distributing increasinglyfrequent updates across their systems – which many IT departments will find impossible because of outdated infrastructure.”According to Kollective, a potential issue for IT is that if all theupdates happen in March and October, the corporate networkcould be overloaded as updates go to every Windows device. n❯What can Chromebooks offer the enterprise desktop market?computerweekly.com29 January - 4 February 2019 6

CASE STUDYHomeNewsWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisationDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntimeM&A in action: Majestic Wine pairs withNaked Wines for cloud-led digitisationCaroline Donnelly finds out how the acquisition of online-only wine retailer Naked Wines in 2015 has shaped thedigital transformation plans of its parent company Majestic Wine, allowing it to keep pace with modern challengesAs the UK retail market braces itself for another year ofuncertainty and struggle, a number of bricks and mortar retailers are turning to technology to help streamlinetheir operations and build out their online shopping capabilities.And store-based specialist wine retailer Majestic Wine is nodifferent, having moved to acquire its online-only rival NakedWines in 2015 for 70m – not only to increase its market sharelocally and overseas, but to help fast-track its own digital transformation plans as well.Naked Wines operates on a subscription-like model, wherebycustomers pay 20 a month into their account, which is used tofund the making of wines by independent producers.The end products are then made available to Naked Winessubscribers to buy on an exclusive basis for around 25 to 50%less than an equivalent supermarket offering,At the time of the Majestic acquisition, Naked Wines was lessthan 10 years old, but had already established itself as a highgrowth business, with annual sales in excess of 80m. It wasalso growing at a rate of 40% year-over-year, with a break-evenforecast of March 2016.Fast forward to 2018, and the Majestic Wine Group’s yearin review document suggests Naked Wines has become theorganisation’s second most profitable brand of the four thatmake it up, posting earnings before tax of 8.7m against salesof 156.1m.High-growth acquisition targetEarnings aside, the organisation had a number of other elementsthat marked it out as a compelling acquisition target. Theseinclude its customer relationship management (CRM) system,which Majestic hailed as instrumental in helping the firm createa growing and loyal, recurring revenue-generating subscriberbase, and a cloud-savvy team of techies.“Naked Wines was built with technology embedded in thecompany from the start,” Majestic Wine IT development manager Rob Kay tells Computer Weekly.computerweekly.com29 January - 4 February 2019 7

CASE STUDYHomeWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisationDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntimeIts in-house teams created the technology stacks that underpinned its websites, its call centres and other support services,and – from day one – they all ran in the cloud, relying initially onAmazon Web Services’ (AWS) compute and storage services topower them.This model had paved the way for the Norwich-based firmto expand its business interests to the US and Australia, whichwould have been practically and financially harder to do if itrelied on on-premise servers and storage systems to run itsbusiness, says Kay.By comparison, its parent company had a more restrictive, traditional and mainframe-reliant IT setup. “For a lot of retailers,technology has never been high on the list of [investment priorities], at least not until very recently, and Majestic Wines is quitesimilar in that respect,” says Kay.He joined Majestic three months after the acquisition, inSeptember 2015, when the onus was on getting the firm to modernise its technology strategy, so that it would be more in keeping with the Naked Wines way of doing things. Primarily, thatmeant helping the firm make better use of its customer data,while bringing together their divergent IT systems.“We’ve been slowly migrating everything about the Majesticbusiness, which started with building a data warehouse becausethey had no concept of what that was,” says Kay.“Over the past three years, we’ve also migrated them onto [theNaked Wines] e-commerce platform,” he adds. This is anotheroffering the firm created in-house that makes liberal use of AWStechnologies to keep it up and running.MAJESTIC WINENewscomputerweekly.com29 January - 4 February 2019 8

CASE STUDYHomeDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntimeMigrate to innovateFaster response timesSince moving Majestic over to the cloud-basede-commerce platform, the company can respondmore quickly to changes in customer wine-buyinghabits, and no longer has to rely on over-provisioning its infrastructure during peak trading periods.“The busiest time of the year for us is the weekbefore Christmas, but during the first week ofJanuary, no one really wants wine, and we nowhave the capability to spend less on our infrastructure in January than we did in December,”he says.At the time of writing, the company stillhas “some datacentres” in operation, and itis in the throes of migrating a number of itslegacy applications to the cloud – primarilyfor security management reasons.INEM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisation“That is one of the greater concerns – that things satin a datacentre can’t be centrally managed. Our preference is to use the services Amazon provides so we don’thave to worry about those things,” he says.STICWWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportChief among them is AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a service usedto ease the deployment of web apps by making the underlyingcompute, storage and load-balancing resources easier to orchestrate, and the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).“In short, what this means is we now have all of the customerdata and order data in one place, in the cloud,” says Kay, adding that the migration has brought business agility benefits to Majestic. “We were hamstrung by technology inMajestic three years ago because we were unable tomove quickly, but we’re not anymore.”MAJENewsAt present, there is still some distance left for MajesticWine to run on its migration journey, but much of the“heavy lifting” has been completed, according to Kay.“We haven’t quite gone from the mainframe yet, butthat’s our migration process and we’ve done the coreof it so far,” he says. “One way of looking at it is like atree: we’ve chopped off the really big roots, but thereare some smaller ones clinging on.”With the “core” taken care of, the company is betterpositioned to experiment with emerging technologiesand use its data to enhance and improve the wine-buyingexperience for both its in-store and online customers. Byrecommending wines, for example, based on previous purchases or what other customers have bought, it will be easierfor customers to find wines in-store they might like.“Historically, if you’ve walked into a Majestic shop, you’veseen displays that say, ‘Here are all the French wines’, and thatis great if you are a top wine buff. But, generally, people go byflavours and know they like crisp and fruity wines, for example,”says Kay. “So it is about using technology to guide them to thatand to help find the wines they like online, but also to provide acrossover into our stores.”computerweekly.com29 January - 4 February 2019 9

CASE STUDYHomeNewsWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisationDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentGenerating recommendationsOn the Naked Wines side, the use of technology has involvedintroducing elements of machine learning to help generaterecommendations for customers who need guidance on whatwines to buy.“We see huge potential [to do more] here and accelerate ourability to use the data we have and fit that into a model thatsays, ‘We know you’re really going to like these wines’, or, if thecustomer comes to the site and already knows they want sixbottles of a certain wine, but asks for our help in what else toselect to fill a case of 12 bottles,” says Kay.The firm is also trialling the use of machine learning tools inits customer contact centres, where the bulk of the queries firedthe company’s way are email-based.“We’re trialling some stuff to see how well we can infer meaning from customer emails and make sure they get to the rightpeople. It is by no means simple, but we can see some potentialhere for sure,” says Kay.At the same time, Majestic is looking at the tweaks it needs tomake to its existing platforms and services to ensure it can continue to keep pace with whatever challenges the retail marketthrows up next.“We’ve done a lot of work to get Majestic off the really old stuff,and we’re continuing to modernise [our IT estate] by headingdown the serverless and microservices route,” says Kay. “We’llhave even fewer servers to manage and less storage to worryabout, which is definitely where we will be going. That will be anongoing process, and I’m not sure it will ever stop.” nBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntimeMAJESTIC WINEcomputerweekly.com29 January - 4 February 2019 10

INTERVIEWHomeNewsWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisationDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntimeDunnhumby analyses its data challengesDavid Jack, CTPO at analytics pioneer Dunnhumby, tells Angelica Mari howhe is working to scale up the company’s platforms and migrate to the cloudThis will be a busy year for UK customer data specialistDunnhumby as the company seeks to launch a range ofnew products to fend off competition, while driving a largecloud computing implementation.The firm has a broad technology agenda, covering everythingfrom C-level consulting to a large range of products that includeapplied data science tools and fully automated real-time data science platforms that handle billions of bid requests a day for retailers, consumer goods companies and firms from other sectors.To modernise the foundations supporting its product portfolio,there are some large IT programmes under way at Dunnhumby,such as the ongoing decommissioning of datacentres and bigticket traditional hardware that will see the firm’s analyst platforms being provisioned entirely in the cloud.Dunnhumby faces fierce competition in the analytics space, soit also plans to bring a lot of products it has been working on tolight this year. Chief technology and product officer (CTPO) DavidJack joined the firm in May 2018, with a remit covering all thesefronts and more – such as venture capital investment and skillspartnerships with universities.David Jack,Dunnhumby: “Wehave accumulatedover 1,000 years ofcorporate memory”computerweekly.com29 January - 4 February 2019 11

INTERVIEWHomeNewsWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisationDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntime“My first areas of attention over the last six or seven monthshave been about the platforms that we build our products on anduse to interface to our client systems,” says Jack. “I have also beenaccelerating the building of the scale of these platforms and driving down the economic cost of operating them.“That means we can exploit more science, innovate and executefaster, bring more value to our clients. And that’s really exciting.”“Cloud provisioning is not justa case of sounding sexy – it isphenomenally helpful to runscience models at huge scale”David Jack, DunnhumbyDunnhumby recognises it is up against large players with serious firepower and needs to remain at the top of customers’ minds,so it will release a number of new products in 2019. According toJack, these new systems will be either completely new offeringsor delivered to markets where they are not already present.“We have a lot of ‘almost products’ that are well executed, easyto deploy and mature in both development and operation,” hesays. “A number of these are nearly there in terms of seeing thelight of day. I’ve spent the last few months sifting through themand figuring out which ones to accelerate into the markets.”Another key area of focus for Jack is to evolve Dunnhumby’sconcept of global code lines, whereby computational models arerewritten in the latest technologies and then made available tocustomers across multiple markets.“This spring, we will demonstrate a new look and feel and a newsense of what we mean when we say we are a customer data science platform,” he says. “The idea is that different product propositions feel connected and, as clients adopt one product, they willstart seeing the journey to more products in our inventory.”The right to winAccording to Jack, Dunnhumby has “the right to win” when itcomes to competition – partly because of its history of nearlythree decades serving some of the most demanding retailers inthe world, including its parent, Tesco.“We have accumulated over 1,000 years of corporate memoryabout how to apply data insights and data modelling to bringingvalue to retailers over our nearly 30-year history,” he says. “Veryfew competitors can point to that level of intellectual capital.”Dunnhumby has been evolving in its cloud adoption and willmove forward with a large migration of its analytics product setsthis year. Jack says the project consists of taking products as theyare, putting wrappers around them and migrating them into thecloud, as well as some new products that are cloud-native.“The cloud migration is driven by the economic advantage,but there is also the point that in data and computational science, cloud provisioning is not just a case of sounding sexy – itis phenomenally helpful to run science models at huge scale forcomputerweekly.com29 January - 4 February 2019 12

INTERVIEWHomeNewsWhy CIOs need toreshape desktop IT toprepare for Windows 7end of supportreduced cost,” he says. “It would be almost unthinkable in a traditional infrastructure, processing thousands and thousands ofinstances of insight at any given time, then collapsing that infrastructure when it is no longer needed.”Three buckets of cloud dataM&A in action:Majestic Wine pairswith Naked Wines forcloud-led digitisationDunnhumby analysesits data challengesEditor’s commentBuyer’s guide todeep learningHow technologycan help fashionretail’s eco ambitionHow to cut your waythrough the jungleof cloud optionsDowntimeWhen it comes to the cloud data that the company migrates,there are three buckets. The first is data brought in from clients, which is ingested, conformed, mapped to a common datamodel, then made available to Dunnhumby’s data lake.The second bucket is providing a data analytics platform thatis used as though all the data conforms and powers the insighttools that come with it. The third bucket is when all products arenatively hosted in a cloud environment.“Considering those three blocks, the first is lifting and shiftingour data, [running] ingestion processes and putting them intothe cloud,” says Jack. “Through a large majority of clients that weintend migrating, we are already there – that’s what we’ve beenrunning in the past year.“On the second piece, the related analyst tools and platforms,we run that entirely in parallel – and that’s a huge way through aswell. The third piece, which is lifting our current product set andputting it into the cloud, and new products being developed forcloud delivery, that’s at a much earlier stage.”When it comes to supplier

behalf of software-defined delivery specialist Kollective, looked at the potential costs and security threats of staying on Windows 7 beyond Microsoft’s support deadline of 14 January 2020. After that date, Microsoft will no longer issue operating system patche