Cycling retail giant Wiggle pedals towards cloud

Wiggle will increasingly look to cloud computing to enable it to scale as the British online cycling and sports e-commerce retailer strategically plans to become a global player.

Wiggle, from Portsmouth but with operations in London, is the Amazon of participatory sports like cycling, running and triathlon.

These three sports have seen unprecedented levels of growth in recent years in the UK following the success of Team GB, Sky procycling riders Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome and the London Olympics. Across Europe and Asia these sports have also grown as lifestyles change away from sedentary car travel and gym membership towards outdoor sports like cycling. This change has driven growth at Wiggle.

“We are not likely to go with a large scale end-to-end ERP,” says Wiggle CIO Mark Dermody in a CIO UK profile interview. “We are considering a number of solutions for the buying and finance processes. Master data management and how cloud computing can be used are being considered closely.”

As Wiggle becomes an increasingly global brand, Dermody sees cloud as an inevitable gear for his operation, especially software as a service. Cloud is already used for development, customer surveys and in the contact centre.

Wiggle expects to have to add local operations to its business as its global reach increases. At present all operations and shipments are made from the UK. But as the company grows Dermody told CIO UK he believes software-as-a-service and cloud computing will be used to scale the organisation across the globe.

In the last year Dermody and his team have put in the two largest IT projects of Wiggle’s short history, a new carrier management system for its logistics and a warehouse management system that eradicated a swathe of paper processes that even a 13-year-old company can find itself beset with. With both projects successful Dermody is assessing further improvements to the back office operations at Wiggle that will provide the flexibility a growing online retailer needs to scale.

Read the CIO UK Profile of Wiggle’s Mark Dermody