The Success in the Hostile Competitive Environment - Essay Example

 Founded in 2007, Gilt groupe has recorded immense growth in their membership and has become a giant in offering its members merchandise home decor, travel and clothing. The growing number of customers who access the groupe website requires a reliable and fast speed service that will ensure continued profitability and customer satisfaction. In a highly competitive industry, a firm has to change and conform to the new customer requirement if it expects to record better performance and profits. Gilt groupe was faced with the challenge of ensuring consistency in their customer experience, reduction in back-end costs, and increase in their revenue (Roberts & Salhman 24). To achieve these goals, Gilt groupe made riverbed manage their traffic. Gilt had to ensure their website was user friendly and while maintaining the simplicity. The page has to be attractive to display the products being merchandised. Through shifting to cloud environment, gilt would realize flexibility, speed, and expansion in their operations. In addition, Gilt groupe (GG) had to ensure safety of their data and security. If data is not well protected from hackers and crackers, the competitors of GG could get access to their strategy and goals which could hamper the achievement of their objectives. In order to ensure this, gilt group depended on the services of riverbed. The problem that faces Guilt group is how to ensure that there large number of users access their sites without difficulty and failure. What continued to pose additional challenge was the fact that the number of visitors accessing the site during the peak periods continued to rise (Roberts & Salhman 24). An unreliable site would make the company lose vast profits making an investment in the cloud environment urgent and profitable. To help crack the challenges facing the groupe, it sourced the services of Riverbed and this enabled them to achieve the following. GG tripled their traffic within a year meaning that the number of people who accessed and shopped from their site increased. Again, the groupe managed to in moving their architecture from hosted environment to a cloud environment that was simple to operate (Roberts & Salhman 25). With this, everything worked successfully including fault tolerance in the cluster. Moreover, the multi-tier service managed by Riverbed allowed Guilt to manage their infrastructure with a common and reliable content cache. The data sources of gilt are split in different pools thus enabling them to serve the diverse nature of their clients with the required information. The services also enabled authentication to services, which helped in blocking unauthorized subscribers and stepped up the security of their website. The payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) ensured customer security using the firewall when handling payments and credit card requests (Roberts & Salhman 25). Sensitive data was therefore locked and they complied with PCI DSS. Moreover, the use of specialized content cashing enables GG’s website decrease the latency and improves the speed, user experience, and performance. Retrieving data was made faster because the cache contents was placed near the users as possible to reduce the trips to back end servers (Roberts & Salhman 26). As a result, customers realized enhanced page load times since the dynamic content could be served from a cloud nearer the customers. In addition, the de-commissioning of servers after adopting the riverbed cloud helped reduce cost. Back-end server needs were reduced by fifty percent. Despite the reduction in the server pools, the adoption of cloud made gilt record three times increase in the number of trafficking. The interface further enabled them to monitor all the traffic in real time hence assisting in planning for future provisioning. Operations in a highly competitive industry require constant assessment of the environment. Through such assessment, the company gets to identify areas that requires improvements and those that can result into decline in the company performance. A SWOT analysis is usually conducted to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and the threats that face a business. The environmental scan of Gilt reveals several strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. To begin with, the strengths, the reliable website with a easier user interface ensured customer satisfaction and easy interaction in shopping online. GG cost minimization was strength since it helped in increasing the income of the company that could thus enable them take expansion programmer. The discount offered by GG to their customers made it preferred by the customers who experienced hard economic times. Finally, GG enjoys the strength of dealing in the fast moving luxury products, which ensured that the company experienced a high turnover on their inventory. Weaknesses are those factors that might impair the success of the business and rescue the profit level. GG website has several weaknesses in their website such as spelling mistakes and illogical navigation. GG under weighed the need to provide details in their site an issue that could cause customer dissatisfaction and give inadequate information. Besides the shortages that GG experienced in their supply chain made it lose sales as they ran out of stock at some times. Moreover, GG over depended on their suppliers to offer goods at a discount and since this is not guaranteed, any future change in situation could affect adversely the company’s profits and financial performance (Roberts & Salhman 26). GG has opportunities that it can exploit to increase their market share and finances. First, it can take the advantage of the shutting competitors to attract their customers and increase their sales. GG also has the opportunity to negotiate and enter into new partnership with web players to improve their websites and make them become reliable and dependable. This would also ensure that GG improves their services and serve the increased number of website users. GG also faces several threats. First, the improvement in the economy could preclude suppliers from using the website as the main way of distribution. These would affect the full chain and reduce their sales level. The potential bubble in the market could also wipe out GG from the market. In conclusion, GG has to improve on their weaknesses and threats in order to succeed in the hostile competitive environment. It should further formulate strategies aimed at increasing the market share by attracting customers of the competitors of the underperforming and moribund industry. Customers’ plight and satisfaction is instrumental in sustaining and retaining customers in the online business. Work Cited Roberts, Michael and Salhman, Willam. "Gilt Groupe - Harvard Business Review ." Harvard Business Review Case Studies, Articles, Books . N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2012. . Top of Form Bottom of Form Read More