Nissan is Japan's second largest automobile manufacturer with a brand that is recognised around the world. Its extensive range of vehicles and supporting services are designed to offer its customers distinctive design, superior performance and value.
As customers increasingly continue to use the Internet as their first port of call for information and research, Nissan has experienced substantial year on year growth in the number of customers visiting its websites.
In 2004, Nissan had an annual total of over 8 million unique website visitors. However, given the current growth figures, the company is expecting traffic to increase to approximately twenty million unique visitors by the end of 2006. Nissan Europe, in particular, wanted to ensure that it had the scalable and reliable web infrastructure it needed to support this growth for all its European websites.
Technical strength for maximum availability
“We offer a variety of information on our websites including special offers, dealership information and interactive tools such as car builder so it is important that our customers can easily access this information 24x7x365,” states Peter Walton, Manager B2B, Dealer systems and Web Solutions, Nissan Europe. “NTT Europe Online is a highly professional and experienced managed hosting partner that could offer us the service availability guarantees we needed to protect our brand equity and customer service capabilities.”
NTT Europe Online designed, implemented and now manages a high availability web infrastructure. Middleware application management including Vignette and Websphere application server is provided by NTT Europe Online’s partner, Smart 421. A fail over site has also been developed to ensure continuity of service in the event of a disaster or incident that may temporarily disrupt site availability.
Smart Content Delivery for 100 per cent service quarantee
Alongside these services, Nissan Europe chose to use NTT Europe Online’s Smart Content Delivery (SCD). Using the NTT Communications Global IP Network, SCD enables customers to cache static and rich media content to reduce load on the web infrastructure and cope with sporadic or peak periods of high-demand for content. By incorporating SCD into Nissan Europe’s solution, NTT Europe Online was able to offer the company a 100% guarantee for the delivery of static content on all of Nissan’s European sites.
“The strength, range and global reach of NTT Europe Online’s services, alongside its technical expertise and service level guarantees, was a compelling proposition for us. We are confident that the solution NTT Europe Online designed will meet both our current and future requirements in terms of growth, performance and functionality enhancements. The capabilities of SCD, in particular, fits well with our future plans for the use of video streaming,” concludes Walton.