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Founded in 2003, Eagle Eye is a fast growing UK Software as a Service (SaaS) business that validates and redeems digital promotions. The company, which was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2014, serves top UK grocery, retail and hospitality businesses such as Asda®, Marks and Spencer and Pizza Express. It does this through its digital marketing platform Eagle Eye AIR which replaces traditional paper-based discount coupons with secure, real-time, multi-channel digital promotions and rewards.
The tool develops hyper-loyalty by distributing offers that encourage customers to make repeat purchases from its clients rather than switching between brands. Former Tesco CEO and renowned retail industry figure Sir Terry Leahy is a Non-Executive Director of the company with former Tesco Deputy CEO Tim Mason joining as Chairman this month.
The growth of the business has caused the number of transactions that needed processing to more than double in 2015 compared to the previous year, with 3.7 million transactions handled in December 2015 alone. This culminated in a busy end of year when retailers in particular were using Eagle Eye’s services to offer price reductions and attract valuable customers during the highly competitive Christmas and January sales season. To meet this demand, it used Rackspace Managed Cloud and DevOps Automation Services which helps enable the platform to scale up quickly and accommodate a sudden rise in activity.
Steve Rothwell, Founder and CTO of Eagle Eye says: “With millions of transactions running through our platform every month, any downtime can be very costly for our customers and ultimately Eagle Eye too. Therefore, we have to offer extremely high availability which would be hard for us to achieve and manage using only in-house resources. That’s why we approached Rackspace to assist us with its 24/7 support and expertise. This allows us to focus on delivering the best possible service for our customers safe in the knowledge that our IT infrastructure is running smoothly.”
Another reason why Eagle Eye implemented Rackspace DevOps Automation Services was to support its fast growth. The solution provides the rapid deployment of servers to deliver new features faster and scaling of the company’s entire application environment is automated, which improves developer productivity. The business also uses a Rackspace managed OpenStack® public cloud platform to host testing environments. This technology allows Eagle Eye clients to access valuable benefits such as customer tracking and data capture, increased spend in-store, improved redemption rates and helps eliminate fraudulent activity associated with traditional coupons and vouchers.
Darren Norfolk, MD of Rackspace UK added: “From the early stages of its inception, Eagle Eye chose to embrace managed cloud when deciding how to host its infrastructure. This has given the company access to a highly scalable and robust solution, while outsourcing the responsibility of maintaining it. This technology has helped support the business’ fast paced growth and its goal of helping brands develop ‘hyper-loyal’ customers through enticing consumer offers.”
Eagle Eye’s focus for 2016 is to enhance its services through hyper-personalisation by enabling retailers to tailor offers and rewards to each individual consumer based on data captured by the platform. The aim of this is to give the right people, the right offers at the right time. The company believes this will take hyper-loyalty to a new level and leave behind the days of what Rothwell calls ‘shopper promiscuity’ where consumers are incentivised to shop around rather than encouraged to be loyal.
Eagle Eye will use a number of technologies to develop hyper-personalisation and achieve its other goals for the year. This includes firewalls for security, load balancers to prepare for traffic spikes, dedicated servers to power the applications and APIs and hypervisors to run the virtualisations. On top of the infrastructure, Rackspace is managing applications and services such as Apache, MySQL, Elasticsearch and RabbitMQ. Rackspace helps manage these services and provides 24/7/365 support for them so that they are readily available for Eagle Eye’s clients.
