Customer Solution Case Study
PPG Industries Supports Sudden Web Traffic Spikes of 800 Percent
with Cloud Platform
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: ManufacturingProcess manufacturing
Customer Profile
PPG Industries, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is one of the
worlds largest manufacturers of coatings and specialty
products.
Business Situation
PPG wanted to explore digital platforms for global marketing. It
got its chance when a customer asked it for a hosted application to
help market an inventory of 5,000 paints.
Solution
PPG created the Paint Sample Selector using Microsoft
Silverlight and hosted it on the Windows Azure platform for cloud
computing.
Benefits
Achieves 80 percent visitor adoption
Supports sudden, 800 percent spikes in web traffic
Meets criteria for long-term, global marketing platform
Its clear that the cloud will become an increasingly important
part of our technology use. Its also clear that Windows Azure has
what it takes to be our cloud-computing platform.
Chris Caruso, Global Business IT Director, PPG Industries
When global manufacturer PPG Industries was founded in 1883,
high-tech marketing meant printing a flyer. Today, it means keeping
up with constantly changing digital channels and platforms. PPG
recently got the chance to explore new approaches for marketing its
paint brands when it created the web-based Paint Sample Selector
tool for one of the worlds largest home-improvement retailers. The
solution had to help consumers to make sense of 5,000 paint
choices, run with high reliability, and scale to support sudden
spikes. PPG accomplished this with the Windows Azure platform for
cloud computing and Microsoft Silverlight. Site visitors use the
tool intuitively and immediately. The solution has scaled to
support sudden spikes of 800 percent. And PPG has found a
technology that meets its criteria for a long-term, global
marketing platform.
Situation
Its probably fair to say that a company doesnt get to be 128
years old, operate manufacturing facilities in more than 60
countries around the world, and earn annual revenues of more than
U.S.$13 billion, without knowing how to market itself.
So what was PPG Industries worried about?
The company is one of the worlds largest manufacturers of
coatings and specialty products. Those products are used in or on
homes and buildings of all types, airplanes, golf balls, circuit
boards, packaging, appliances, flooring, automobiles, bridges,
high-performance lenses, electronic passports, and green car
tiresamong others. A lesser company would be satisfied with this.
But PPG executives saw their continued market leadership as a
challenge to be met, not an assumption on which to rest.
We want to drive our brands to maintain and expand their market
positions, says Chris Caruso, Global Business IT Director at PPG
Industries. When youre looking at a global market, it requires an
increasing reliance on digital platforms that can reach your
customers wherever they are. How we use technology to expand our
global market reach will be a key differentiator, a competitive
advantage for years to come. We have to get it right.
But with digital platforms evolving so rapidly, what works today
might not be what works tomorrow. Caruso and his colleagues needed
to keep their strategy for digital marketing evolving just as
rapidly as the technology itself.
PPG got an opportunity to advance that strategy in December 2010
when it was approached by one of its biggest customersone of the
worlds top home-improvement retailers. PPG had been selling its
Olympic-brand paints exclusively through the retailer for about 14
years. The retailer had targeted consumers in their 20s and 30s,
who were perhaps buying their first apartments and houses, and who
could become lifelong customers. That target group was also highly
interested in using Internet-based sales and marketing
channels.
Hence the retailers interest in an online application, ColorClix
Visualizer, which PPG had built for its own Olympic brand website.
With the application, consumers can easily choose the type of room
they want to paintbathroom, kitchen, bedroom, for exampleand the
colors they might want to use on the walls, trim, ceiling, and as
an accent. Seeing the results of various color combinations is as
simple as dragging and dropping color swatches and watching a
photograph of the selected room change to reflect the new color
scheme. Consumers can save their projects online, share them, and
return to them later.
The home-improvement retailer wanted to link to the ColorClix
Visualizerand more. It also wanted PPG to develop and host a
web-based solution to make it just as easy for its customers to
select and buy samples of the paintsany paints, in any combination,
from any manufacturerin its inventory. Thats 5,000 paints.
The challenge was daunting to PPG. First was the question of how
to enable consumers to make informed, successful choices among
5,000 electronic swatches of paint. Second was the question of how
and where to host the paint-choosing application, assuming it could
be built. PPG couldnt reliably build out capacity at its own data
center when it lacked a good forecast of the load that the
application would generateand of the speed, size, and frequency
with which that load would vary in response to marketing promotions
by the retailer.
Did PPG want to take on the assignment? It did.
Solution
It was relatively easy for PPG to resolve the question of how
and where to host the solution, which came to be called the Paint
Sample Selector. A few months earlier, in October 2010, PPG had
decided to move its Olympic.com website, then hosted internally, to
a cloud-computing provider. The company had been attracted by the
broad promise of cloud computing: a hosting environment that could
provide as much scalability as needed, and that could be scaled
back just as readily so that the company would pay only for what it
used.
We looked at several cloud options, but our final choice was our
main choice all along: Windows Azure, says Caruso. Windows Azure,
the Microsoft cloud services development, hosting, and management
environment, provides on-demand computing, storage, networking, and
content delivery through Microsoft data centers.
We felt more comfortable with the Microsoft platform because we
knew our long-term need was for a platform that could support the
major international presence of our major brands. We wanted to move
more of our marketing presence to the cloud over time, and we
wanted a platform that could support that, says Caruso. We didnt
want to have to rely on a series of hosters. We didnt want to have
to manage our serversonsite or in a cloud. We wanted the platform
to be provided to us as a managed service. We wanted cloud
technology that was already familiar to our developers and IT
administrators, and that would fit with the technology we already
had in place. We wanted Windows Azure.
The qualities that earned Windows Azure the job of hosting
Olympic.com are even more important for the Paint Sample Selector.
The application appears on the website of one of the worlds largest
retailers, generating high traffic. That volume can vary widely and
quickly, depending on the retailers promotions. And if there were
ever an outage, it wouldnt put just PPGs reputation at risk; PPG
would be putting its customers reputation at risk, too.
To help ensure the best possible performance for a global
audience, PPG supports the solution with the Windows Azure Content
Delivery Network (CDN). With Windows Azure CDN, PPG can store the
visual data for those 5,000 paint samples, in addition to the
potentially far larger amount of data contained in the projects
that consumers can save to the site. The company can handle sudden
peaks in load more easily. And it can put content closer to
consumers, wherever in the world those consumers are, to boost
performance and reduce latency. Image storage is managed in Windows
Azure Blob Storage and metadata about the paint colors is managed
in Microsoft SQL Azure, the self-managed, multitenant relational
cloud database service built on Microsoft SQL Server
technologies.
Figure 1: With the Paint Sample Selector and ColorClix
Visualizer, a web visitor can go from 5,000 colors to seeing a
chosen color on a sample wall in just five steps.
Making Sense of 5,000 Colors
After deciding on Windows Azure for hosting, Caruso and his
colleagues still faced the challenge of developing the solution
and, especially, of finding a way for consumers to make sense of
the 5,000 color options available to them.
Then they came across Microsoft Silverlight PivotViewer
technology in Microsoft Silverlight 4, a powerful tool for creating
and delivering rich Internet applications and media experiences on
the Web. Silverlight PivotViewer seemed as if it had been invented
precisely to meet PPGs need. The technology makes it easier for
users to work with thousands of data elements in highly visual,
useful, and intuitive ways. More than just enabling users to
navigate through data, Silverlight PivotViewer creates value for
users by putting individual data elements in the context of both
the entire group of elements and within subgroups of the data.
This is exactly how PPG put Silverlight PivotViewer to use.
Customers approaching the full color palette of the Paint Sample
Selector (Figure 1, first screen) can use a menu-driven column on
the left of the screen to select a variety of color subsets to
consider. They can select colors by color group (e.g., yellows,
reds, blues), color family (muted, bright, shaded, pure), brand,
and popularity. They can select a single criterion to explore a
large number of colors, or add a second criterion (e.g., muted
reds, Olympic blues, the most popular bright colors).
Or, customers can continually add to their criteria, narrowing
their choices as they go. As shown in the second screen in Figure
2, the customer has selected bright/clean greens, and then (third
screen) has chosen the most popular Olympic paints from that group.
In two steps, the customer has reduced the set of 5,000 colors to
just 5.
The customer might then select a colorhere, Olympic B66-6 Bell
Pepper (fourth screen)with details about the color appearing on the
right. The customer can click to order a paint sample or, as in
this example, click to bring the color into the ColorClix
Visualizer. There, its possible to see how the paint looks on, for
example, the wall of a bedroom (fifth screen).
What these screenshots dont capture is the deep zoom effect with
which the Paint Sample Selector works. Colors fly in and out of the
screen and reorganize themselves according to the customers
selection, and zoom from the full color set to a subset or to a
single color, and back again, as the customer changes criteria and
view settings. Both Silverlight PivotViewer and Windows Azure make
this possible; the deep zoom effect is obtained by moving among 13
separate images, at varying resolutions, for each of the 5,000
colorsgreatly increasing the data load on Windows Azure and relying
on Windows Azure CDN to deliver all of those images and resolutions
seamlessly, wherever theyre needed.
A Family of Applications
More than developing a single Paint Sample Selector application,
PPG has developed what Caruso calls a family of applications that
work together across the retailers website and PPGs Olympic brand
websiteapplications for capturing colors from the real world (e.g.,
nature, a magazine, a museum painting)translating the colors into
choices for selecting paints from an inventory of thousands, for
exploring the use of selected paints on sample rooms, and for
ordering paint samples.
The family also extends to several platforms. The applications
run on the web, desktops, and phones. The purpose is to make the
tools available to consumers wherever they happen to beand to make
consumers developing projects available to them as they move from
home, to dinner with friends, to one of the retailers stores. The
enabling technology behind this variety is Windows Azure.
Windows Azure is the glue that holds together everything weve
done, says Caruso. The business logic and data is hosted in Windows
Azure and shared among the applications and platforms.
Benefits
PPG used Microsoft technologies to create compelling
consumer-facing marketing application; to host that application on
a tremendously scalable platform with global reach; and to point to
a long-term, flexible, powerful digital platform for the companys
40 brands.
Achieves 80 Percent Visitor Adoption Rate
PPGs first goal for the Paint Sample Selector was to create a
highly intuitive, engaging, and useful application that would serve
consumers by facilitating their paint choices and purchases.
Meeting that goal would be a sales and marketing benefit for PPGs
customer, the home-improvement retailer, which would in turn
reinforce the relationship between it and PPG.
PPG succeeded.
Validation of the intuitive nature of the applicationand
especially of Silverlight PivotViewercame just four minutes after
the applications launch. Thats how long it took for a site visitor
to use the tool to find the one paint sample, among 5,000, that had
been specially marked as part of a launch promotion. We didnt
include any instructions on the site about how to use Silverlight
PivotViewer, says Caruso. We didnt need to. People get it
immediately.
There are more quantifiable measures of success. All the web
metrics we track point to our success; its phenomenal, says Caruso.
Eighty percent of visitors to the site use the tool, and 30 percent
of visitors use it between 5 and 30 minutes at a time.
Supports Sudden, 800 Percent Spikes in Web Traffic
PPG chose to host the Paint Sample Selector on Windows Azure and
the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network to gain the benefits of
unlimited scalability, reliability, and global performance. It made
the right choice.
After a period in which the solution was available on the
retailers site but unadvertised, the retailer formally launched the
Paint Sample Selector by introducing it to 500,000 of its closest
friendsFacebook friends, that ison a Sunday evening in January
2011. To prepare for the launch, PPG doubled the number of Windows
Azure instances supporting the solution from two to four. Within
minutes of the Facebook launch, traffic on the applications site
soared by 800 percent.
The spike in traffic went up like a rocket, but it didnt faze
Windows Azure, says Caruso. We saw we had no reason to be concerned
about scalability. And we can set additional instances to kick in
automatically when needed, so we dont even have to think about how
high the traffic might go.
Meets Criteria for Long-Term, Global Marketing Platform
PPG saw the Paint Sample Selector project as an opportunity to
advance its exploration of digital marketing solutions that can be
applied across its product line. That opportunity, too, is paying
off for the company.
First, the project has convinced PPG that Windows Azure provides
the scalability and global reach that it also needs for other
potential brand campaigns. Well move applications and programs to
the cloud on a case-by-case basis, as it makes sense to do so, says
Caruso. Its clear that the cloud will become an increasingly
important part of our technology use. Its also clear that Windows
Azure has what it takes to be our cloud-computing platform. Thats a
necessary foundation for our global digital-marketing
activities.
Another benefit to PPG of using Windows Azure as its
cloud-computing platform is the ability of its developers to speed
development with familiar and intuitive tools and technologies.
Because the target platform is still Windows, developers used their
existing toolsetincluding Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010saving the time
and cost of acquiring and learning a new development platform.
The project also used toolssuch as Silverlight PivotViewerwith
which PPG developers were unfamiliar. When we proposed that we use
Silverlight PivotViewer for organizing and searching the paint
samples, we didnt have any experience with it. We didnt know much
about Silverlight PivotViewer other than that we liked what it
could do, says Caruso. Then we went from conception to product
launch in six weeksthats how easy and intuitive this technology is
to use.
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For more information about PPG Industries products and services,
visit the website at: www.ppg.com
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