Eagle Boys shifts ordering system to Azure

Pizza chain Eagle Boys has embarked on an effort to finely tune its online ordering system in an effort to make an extra 50 percent revenue off each customer.

According to the company’s IT chief, Darryn Parker, every online order is worth an average of 1.5 times one made over the phone or in store.

“We can offer a much more enjoyable experience online,” he told iTnews. “We find this means customers are inclined to spend more.”

Parker said online customers were much more likely to have their pizzas delivered rather than pick them up, thereby incurring a delivery fee and a minimum order threshold.

This sort of business intelligence is behind Parker’s decision to push the online ordering platform to Microsoft Azure cloud hosting.

About six months ago Parker's team began to weigh up its options for a shift away from its existing hosting provider, mainly studying whether to move to AWS or Microsoft's infrastructure-as-a-service.

Parker admitted he had always leaned towards Azure because of the company’s legacy code base and long history as a predominantly Microsoft shop.

“We started punching out code in anger in about October and November,” he said. “The migration was a like-for-like lift and shift, which made it a pretty simple and painless process...The cost of the move has already been covered.”

He estimated the business would now achieve savings "in the hundreds of thousands of dollars" in the coming years. It turns over an estimated $165 million annually.

But the biggest benefit Eagle Boys is likely to receive from its cloud investment will be in website performance and uptime.

“If your website is responding too slowly, customers will simply bounce over to your competitor," Parker said.

“Outages are always a risk when you run an online business, especially in such a cut-throat market."

He expects the shift to Azure will also offer new business insights that can be used by his development team to prioritise fixes.

“We now have access to far more sophisticated performance metrics. These feed directly into the software dev team which they use to drive the development lifecycle.”

Being freed up from “keeping the lights on” also means his developers can turn their attention to building new functionality into the ordering system.

In the months since the new hosting arrangement went live, the team has already made it possible for customers to name their pizza, as well as improving promotions and coupon functionality, Parker said.

A previous version of this story referred to a provided savings figure of $150,000 per annum. This has since been corrected.