Eagle Eye enlists Rackspace to lead 'all-in' Google Cloud Platform migration

Eagle Eye has enlisted the help of Rackspace to oversee the migration of its software-as-a-service-based digital marketing and customer loyalty platform to the Google public cloud.

The Eagle Eye platform is used by high street brands – including Tesco, Pizza Express, Greggs and M&S – to offer promotions and run loyalty programmes for their customers, but its previous infrastructure setup struggled to cope with the growing number of transactions passing through it.

When the platform first launched in 2003, it was processing 10 real-time transactions a minute, Eagle Eye claims, but is now responsible for handling thousands of transactions a minute for hundreds of clients.

The data generated by these transactions is used by retailers to provide customers with personalised offers and promotions, putting additional data processing pressure on the firm’s pre-existing, dedicated Rackspace-hosting environment. This, in turn, prompted the move to a Rackspace-managed Google cloud environment.

Computer Weekly understands the move is currently underway, with the firm undertaking a migration of its “sandbox” environment during February 2019, while its production environment is on course to go live in mid-to-late June 2019.

Earmarked for migration at the moment is the firm’s test and development, user acceptance testing (UAT) environments, as well as its pre- and post-production ones. Eagle Eye is further plotting to go “all-in” with the rest of its applications and workloads within the next year, it confirmed.   

Once the work is completed, Eagle Eye claims the migration means it will be able to process up to 3,000 application programming interface (API) requests per second, while enhancing its ability to scale and expand its business globally.

Steve Rothwell, founder and CTO of Eagle Eye, said the project has enabled the firm to bolster the efficiency of its IT infrastructure.

“By consolidating our technology estate across the globe, we’ve been able to create scale on-demand, rather than working with the continuous expense of ‘always-on’ datacentres,” he said.

“What we’ve done here is achieve real efficiency, establishing a single set of build scripts, code releases and deployment methods for all our Google Cloud Platforms.”

Rackspace and Eagle Eye already have a long-standing technology supplier relationship, prior to teaming up on this project, with the latter previously leaning on the firm for assistance from a hosting, managed cloud and DevOps automation perspective.

Where the Google Cloud Platform is concerned, Rackspace offers managed service support to users of the search giant’s public cloud, as part of its multi-cloud proposition for enterprises.

On this point, Nick Henry, general manager of managed public cloud at Rackspace, added: “We meet our customers at any step in their digital transformation journey to provide them with unbiased expertise.

“For Eagle Eye, this meant they could focus on providing great loyalty programmes and coupons for their retail customers while we managed their migration to Google Cloud to offer the scalability they required.”