Moosejaw

Moosejaw Mountaineering and Backcountry Travel, Inc. opened its first store in 1992 with the intent of providing the finest selection of mountaineering gear and outerwear in the world. Three years later, the company launched its web site, Moosejaw.com, and quickly made its mark in the world of ecommerce by providing a playful, interactive shopping experience for its online customers.

Moosejaw's creative approach to ecommerce reflected its retailing philosophy of making shopping as much fun as “backpacking the Chilkoot trail, climbing in Yosemite, mountaineering in the Himalayas or playing red rover with the neighbors”. The strategy has been a success, allowing Moosejaw to establish and grow a global customer base, extend its brand through viral marketing, and enjoy accelerated growth.

(IBM WebSphere Managed Services)
(24/7 Support) (Reporting & Monitoring)
(Performance Optimization) (Hosting)
(Administration) (QA Automation)

In 2008, executives of Moosejaw.com began to develop a long-term growth plan and concluded their existing platform would not support their goal of generating $100 million in annual sales within five years, up from about $20 million annually. After surveying the marketplace, Moosejaw.com settled on IBM Corp.’s WebSphere Commerce Enterprise platform as it e-commerce engine. WebSphere Commerce was chosen in part because it is used by competitors such as REI, and leading enterprise retailers such as Home Depot. Running IBM WebSphere Commerce meant Moosejaw could maintain its creative approach to e-retailing, while having the same sophisticated ecommerce tools, capabilities, and computing capacity utilized by the largest online retailers.

While WebSphere Commerce would provide Moosejaw with the muscle it needed to grow its ecommerce business, what the retailer lacked was the internal IT resources to effectively manage the WebSphere Commerce platform at optimal efficiency. Moosejaw had always relied on a third-party provider of turnkey services to manage its platform and other aspects of its ecommerce business since launching its site.

In surveying the marketplace for a managed services provider, Moosejaw discovered many third-party platform operators did not specialize in IBM WebSphere Commerce and typically wanted to negotiate a contract that included other services, such as web site design. That approach was not a fit with Moosejaw’s business plan, which called for the company to outsource such services as site design to third-party specialists. Moosejaw’s plan was to rely primarily on technology partners for its IT needs, freeing its modest IT staff to operate in a supervisory capacity and allowing ecommerce managers to focus their attention on marketing and merchandising.

Having a third-party focused solely on managed services that could ensure WebSphere Commerce was rigorously tested prior to roll out and was capable of proactively troubleshooting performance issues before they mushroomed into full blown problems was a key component of Moosejaw’s long-term growth strategy.

Moosejaw contacted SysIQ Inc., which is an IBM reseller partner for WebSphere Commerce and has a proven track record supporting the IBM WebSphere platform. Selecting a managed services partner that can ensure uptime, especially during peak loads, was critical for Moosejaw as much of its business is seasonal, which means capacity and performance must scale on demand.

To meet those requirements, SysIQ continually tests key store functionality such as landing pages, home page, search functionality, shopping cart, authentication and speed of checkout. If any of these elements perform poorly, it will degrade the shopping experience, hurt Moosejaw’s brand, and ultimately cost the retailer sales. These are all key variables that impact performance and customer impressions of Moosejaw site, how consumers perceive the site running was critical to our long-term growth. SysIQ had these variables monitored closely that helped to achieve Moosejaw's goals for site performance leading to a pleasing and unique shopping experience

Additional SysIQ Services for Moosejaw

• 24x7 monitoring of production web site
• 24x7 monitoring of 7 retail locations - POS terminals and store proxy gateways
• Runbook for handling monitoring alerts
• 24x7 support team for handling alerts and ad hoc requests
• Troubleshooting of advanced issues
• IQCenter service delivery portal
• Case management portal
• Assist development team in code deployments
• Implement custom technical and business reports about site activities

The payoff from selecting SysIQ has been page downloads in less than three seconds, increased sales, and 99.9% uptime in the two years SysIQ has been managing Moosejaw’s IBM WebSphere platform.

In addition, SysIQ has made certain customization to make Moosejaw’s site more interactive, which includes product reviews, loads as fast for shoppers logging in from great geographic distances from the server hosting the site as those customers that are closer in.

SysIQ Client Testimonial

"The value of partnering with SysIQ for managed services is that we can focus on the business side of ecommerce knowing we have a partner with the core expertise to manage platform performance as our business expands. We manage a lot of vendor relationships, which is a tricky business model, so having a managed services partner we can count on to meet our uptime requirements is critical. Performance determines success or failure of our business from an IT standpoint. Thanks to SysIQ we have raised the bar on performance and that means more sales and a better customer experience."

Chris Johnson, IT Director
MooseJaw