Product recommendations, also known as “recs,” are a cornerstone to an effective ecommerce merchandising strategy. When fully optimized, recs typically increase retailer revenues by up to 5%.
With the Olympics just around the corner, it’s not just athletes that are undergoing intense preparations in anticipation of record-breaking performance, but also many technology and infrastructure providers. Just in the past two months, outages from Amazon Web Services prompted outcries from many startups (including Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, Quora) and their customers. It’s no wonder that infrastructure uptime and reliability are top of mind these days.
The intensified demand and consequent risk for London’s data centres during the Olympics was identified as early on as 2008, with some companies even suggesting that the official energy supplier to the 2012 Games would have to limit the energy it supplied to other organisations in central London in order to guarantee supplies to the Olympic Park and other venue. One such company, Interxion, is actually going so far as to install sleeping pods at its London data centre campus, so that on-call engineers can be on site 24-7 to ensure uptime for its customers.