Orgill, Inc. is the world’s largest independent hardlines distributor, serving 11,000 different companies throughout North America, South America, and the Pacific Rim. Orgill also provides customers with store merchandise planning, solutions, software, technical services, and advertising services.

The Challenge

Orgill has been a Connectria customer since 2012. After starting with a private cloud environment, Orgill started looking to move to a public cloud considering Azure, Google Cloud Services (GCP), and others. “The broad capabilities that we needed really only existed in the big three: AWS, Azure, and Google,” said David Meany, VP of eCommerce. Orgill quickly decided that Azure would be the best choice to host their cloud environment.

“We migrated to Azure in order to get scalability at capacity and performance on demand. We entertained bids for the Azure build from a number of providers. We picked Connectria, again, because they were obviously the best choice based on our history with them and the strength of their offering.” Later it turns out that the decision to move to Azure in 2018 was also the best choice and would better prepare Orgill for success in 2020.

The Solution

Connectria had a more hands-on role in making and scaling the Azure infrastructure. “When the project was complete, I sent an email to let everyone know it was finished and was pleased nobody had even noticed we made the change. That’s just what you want when you make a large infrastructure change, right? You don’t want your business centers to know there was any change other than an increase in reliability and performance,” said Meany.

In 2020, Connectria continued working with Orgill on additional changes for their migration project and other projects in response to the effects of the pandemic. With significant growth in the hardware and home improvement sector during COVID-19, Orgill adjusted to the influx in business quite well. Traditionally, a large proximity of sales took place at annual in-person buying events.

Connectria worked on the fall 2020 Orgill buying event, taking a formerly physical event, like many organizations, to a virtual event in late August. Connectria helped ensure that Orgill’s environment was able to withstand the impact of increased traffic and reviewed redundancies while addressing fault tolerance. Connectria also spun up additional servers and set up custom monitoring and dashboards to provide executives visibility into their environment and traffic.

The Results

Orgill’s Azure environment has provided them with a myriad of benefits including ease of business, flexibility, and cost savings. “The biggest advantage is that we have an architecture that flexes with us. It makes it much easier for us to roll out new applications, provision our application servers, and more. The ease of moving in and out of services, machines, and capabilities has been very pleasant. On an application-by-application basis, Connectria’s Azure solutions also save us money. It would’ve been more expensive to stay in our old environment, doing what we’re doing than it is in Azure,” said Meany.

He continues, “One of the biggest advantages that Connectria provides for us is having a staff that understands Azure and Microsoft Services. We heavily rely on Microsoft SQL and because of that, the database practice at Connectria is very important to us. We rely on their expertise, load management, and vigilance in ensuring connectivity. When we want to do something, we’re able to do it. From load balancing changes to new services and additional security, Connectria is there. It’s such a comfort to have a competent partner. Connectria makes it easier to rely on them by proactively taking care of us and they’re always looking at ways they can improve our business.”