A virtual motorcycle showroom on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As one of the top two-wheeler manufacturers in India — SMIPL’s (Suzuki Motorcycle India Private Limited) online presence was under-serving a massive market and not an accurate reflection of the quality, performance, and reliability the brand and its’ products are known for worldwide.

Founded in 1909, Suzuki is one of the most prolific motorcycle manufacturers in the world, with extremely popular models like the Hayabusa and GSX-R. Suzuki is an industry leader in key customer segments such as street scooters, dirt bikes, cruisers, ATVs and quads.

With hundreds-of-thousands page views per month, Suzuki knew they needed to better serve their site visitors, improve their online brand experience, and start sharing more engaging information to convert those visitors.

Our mission was to create an “online showroom”, providing visitors the experience they expect when they enter brick-and-mortar showrooms. We were going to make searching for products easy while highlighting the Suzuki brand and experienced service they provide in store.

SMIPL’s website was antiquated, to say the least, and not user-friendly. It was built on a .NET framework and very expensive to maintain.

The pages were hard-coded and not able to accept Excel or CSV file uploads, resulting in manual entry of hundreds of product details for dozens of SKU’s.  Not to mention the tedious tasks required to deal with product special editions or different taxation rules applicable in different regions!

The website had an exceedingly slow load resulting in exceptionally high bounce rates.

90% of sales inquiries, service questions, and customer service was being handled through their Facebook page, which received up to 1,000 queries a day!

The marketing team was struggling with unhappy customers, the web team was stuck updating products by re-writing lines of code individually, and the business was turning off prospects with a sub-par infrastructure.

The previous application built on .NET was hosted on Azure, their CMS was also initially put on the Azure Platform. Before our partnership, they even upgraded to a standalone server — a high-end 16 core CPU with 56 GB RAM… but their environment was still incapable of efficient scaling and reliable performance.

Combining Suzuki’s key parameters and objectives with the current challenges, we designed a new architecture taking into account their current choice of CMS. Re-engineering the CMS and the website on Pimcore — at the time a relatively new open-source platform using PHP with the best of Zend Framework and Symfony.

The complete application was then hosted on an AWS Cloud, which served visitors in time and without page load delays!

We build an admin dashboard featuring single-source and multi-channel publishing functionality. Giving them the ability to manage information while integrating content and data from various sources. Acting as a platform for CaaS (Content as a Service). Helping to maintain the integrity of the extensible design requirements.

The application auto-scalable by using a custom plugin to store static assets in the cloud and serve the end user via CDN (Content Delivery Network), improving overall performance.

• ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) to route and connect incoming traffic to VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) bounded application servers.
• EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for NFS (Network File System} in order to bypass the EFS
  (Encrypting File System) limitation.
• Auto Scaling to handle traffic spikes and reduce costs. considering the application was RAM intensive.
• CloudWatch to monitor the resources used by the instances.
• SES (Simple Email Service) for transactional emails.
• AWS CodeDeploy for continuous integration and deployment among all web servers.
• S3 (Simple Storage Service) to store all the static assets of the website.
• CloudFront as the Content Distribution Network to enable the Asia Pacific region seamless delivery and ensure the content was cached correctly.
• AWS RDS (Relational Database Service) for MySOL, as a backend database used to handle the huge number of queries that SMIPL received on a daily basis.