IBM, KO Technologies and Wickes

For Wickes, a leading, digitally-led British home improvement retailer with an annual turnover of £1.5 billion that specialises in everything from building materials and trade supplies to kitchens, bathrooms, and DIY essentials, achieving full digital autonomy during its massive corporate demerger required a strategic overhaul, not just a cloud relocation.

Using Terraform, an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool created by HashiCorp, an IBM company, KO Technologies delivered an Elevate and Innovate Migration to transform Wickes’ entire IT estate, establishing a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) and implementing an immutable platform.

The result was zero-downtime deployments and a 75% reduction in the time to production, securing Wickes’ future as a standalone, technology-driven retail leader.

Challenges, Solutions, and Results

The migration presented several challenges, including:

• Executing a massive demerger program to transition Wickes into a fully standalone business entity
• Technically separating all application infrastructure from the parent company’s hosted data centre, and building a completely new, independent IT capability for Wickes
• Implementing a cloud-first approach to introduce serverless and microservice technologies

To resolve these, KO Technologies:

• Built an innovative auto-scaling eCommerce infrastructure solution which leverages Packer-built Hybrid AMIs, released using Terraform.
• Established a HashiCorp Nomad-based microservices platform to deploy the next-gen application to.

This resulted in a 75% reduction in time to market, along with the creation and implementation of modern, scalable infrastructure, rather than static and operationally burdened servers.

For more information about the Wickes case study and the full range of HashiCorp solutions KO Technologies implemented, complete the form below.

You can also see a detailed breakdown of the challenges faced, the solutions implemented, and the results of the Wickes case study on KO Technologies’ website here.

For more real-world examples demonstrating how IBM software has helped organisations resolve challenges, see other Use Cases on TechStories here.