In years past, there was a clear distinction between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The former was a brick and mortar event and the latter a single day of online holiday shopping.

This year was markedly different: Many of the “door buster” Black Friday sales at a local retailer could also be found online and retailers such as Amazon, Walmart and others pre-launched or extended Cyber Monday sales, causing many to re-term the period as “Cyber Week”. 

According to Adobe, Cyber Monday hit $2.29 billion in sales, a 16 percent jump in year-on-year growth. However, adding up the results from Cyber Week sales, the total online transactions since Thanksgiving Day are $7.4 billion, producing an astounding 26 percent year-on-year increase. For technology teams, those results aren’t simply a matter of scaling transactions per second. 

The implications for IT 

More than a mere buzzword or marketing gimmick, the now extended period of online sales events has implications for development and IT operations teams. For example, planning for a single Monday when many shop from work can greatly reduce an IT team’s variables and simplify planning to an extent.

On Cyber Monday, the majority of traffic is from desktops supporting standard browser types. Adobe reports that only 18.3 percent of sales come from smartphones or tablets.

Using baselines from previous Cyber Mondays provides some predictability. Like previous years, Cyber Monday sales peaked between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET, with sales in that hour alone totaling $150 million. 

Why Cyber Week is less predictable 

As a multiday event, Cyber Week is truly omnichannel and therefore less predictable. Fraud detection company Iovation estimates that 40 percent of all retail transactions from Black Friday to Cyber Monday come from smartphones and tablets. 

Supporting a multitude of device types is challenging enough but building and maintaining a pipeline of prospects can be even more daunting.

Using APIs to build customized campaigns 

The length of Cyber Week means marketing must create, launch and dynamically rotate a number of holiday campaigns; often based on real-time results from A/B testing. The constant optimization and updates of marketing campaigns can introduce unforeseen scenarios that impact reliability and recovery time. 

What’s more, many of these campaigns are highly personalized and rely on a number of API calls to render a flawless, customized experience. That customization can introduce unforeseen processing overhead and latency. 

A working application economy example 

In many ways Cyber Week is the perfect example of the application economy wherein software development, testing and deployment directly influence if not dictate business success. Application release cycles now occur on a daily basis, introducing new and extreme demands on technology teams to deliver error-free applications and services more frequently and faster than ever before.

Whether in dev, test or production these teams have the shared goal of producing more sales per second during Cyber Week. That shared goal means teams must work in tandem and many online retailers use a DevOps methodology to understand how new approaches to people, process and technology can deliver innovative online shopping experiences in less time and with greater reliability. 

To learn more about how CA can you make DevOps a reality please visit: http://www.ca.com/us/lpg/devops-portfolio-b.aspx 

Shop till you drop but don’t forget DevOps

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