In the past two years, the Dublin-based firm has increased turnover by 70%, with over 1,000 online transactions a day across 6.5 million product listings, as well as opening a distribution centre in Poland last year. A decade long customer of Sungard AS, MicksGarage.com has relied on a highly resilient, multi-tenant cloud solution from Sungard AS to provide the availability and scalability it needed to achieve this growth. This Hybrid Cloud solution, as well as the additional Managed Services it receives, has now become the next critical factor in enabling the organisation to expand into the UK. It will allow MicksGarage.com to easily scale up to manage the extra transactions, as well as making critical systems accessible from anywhere in the world – all with no additional upfront investment costs on hardware.
Today, as Michael Crean, Operations Director and Founder of MicksGarage.com, announces plans to have a physical presence in each European country within five years, he knows his IT infrastructure will not place a limit on his company’s ambitions: “Technology is at the heart of our business, and we wouldn’t have enjoyed our successes without the underlying infrastructure provided by Sungard Availability Services. It has also enabled us to scale up quickly from a small start-up in 2003, to the Pan-European business that we are today.”
Sungard AS also helps MicksGarage.com maintain constant availability in line with fluctuations in customer demand. At the end of last year, the business launched its first TV advert, safe in the knowledge that Sungard AS would ensure the systems would cope and respond to the inevitable demand spikes around advert air-time. Having won the Gold Award in the Entrepreneurial category at the European eCommerce Awards last year, downtime would not just affect bottom line, but also reputation: “Availability is absolutely critical to us,” comments Crean. “Our customers expect to be able to purchase their spare parts urgently, during any time of day, any day of the year. Being down for even a minute would cost us hundreds – an hour would run to thousands – in lost sales and that’s without the knock to our reputation. We needed a partner who guarantees uptime and the level of availability we enjoy from Sungard AS is outstanding.”
A solid platform for partners
As well as aiding the latest expansion, Sungard AS technology has long provided piece of mind to not only MicksGarage.com, but its partners. With technology playing a crucial role in any modern business, this area now attracts a high level of scrutiny from customers and partners alike.
“The quality of technology has become vital when partners look to work with us, but once they learn we work with Sungard AS, the questions appear to stop,” added Crean. “The reliability of Sungard AS’ solutions gives any partner, customer or stakeholder piece of mind and assurance that we are running our business on a highly reliable platform which has the capability to rapidly expand as the business requires.”
