Precision IT: How Watchfinder CIO Jonathan Gill bet the business on cloud

When Watchfinder.co.uk ran its first TV advertising campaign, CIO Jonathan Gill wondered whether its website would be able to withstand the hoped-for spike in traffic

When Watchfinder.co.uk aired its first-ever UK-wide television advertising, IT director Jonathan Gill was a nervous man, but not half as nervous as he would have been were the company's IT infrastructure still running on company-owned kit, rather than in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The advertising - sponsorship of Channel Five's Classic Car Show - caused a spike in traffic of as much as 15 times the pre-owned watch specialist's previous peak, but was easily handled with a pre-emptive tweak of settings that cost less than £100 for the few hours that they were required - a fraction of the cost of tooling up with hardware sufficient to handle such a spike in the pre-cloud era.

Even so, Gill sat nervously at home in front of the TV, with the website analytics on his iPad in one hand, and his laptop in the other, just in case anything went awry.

Indeed, for Gill if anything had've gone wrong, it would have been particularly personal: as IT director since the company's inception more than a decade ago, Gill is entirely responsible for Watchfinder's IT architecture, including its Microsoft stack, largely architected on Microsoft .NET tools, which all ultimately run off of a MySQL database back-end - selected on the grounds of cost when the company was starting up.

Its shift from servers rented from, and hosted by, Rackspace, to an entirely AWS-based cloud infrastructure was also Gill's decision and instigated a front-to-back refresh of the company's IT. "If we'd still been with Rackspace when we were doing the TV advertising, I would've had to have called them up eight weeks in advance and told them, 'I think I need two more servers', and then been tied into a two-year contract," says Gill.

Moving house

The shift to AWS wasn't necessarily a "no brainer", either. "We looked at Microsoft Azure, but that was before it went through its transformation - it was too 'old' Microsoft.

"If you went with Azure, you couldn't go anywhere else. We're a Microsoft .NET house. We use the Microsoft stack because it works. But we want to be free to use any languages and whatever is the best way to solve a particular problem," says Gill. Going with Azure back in 2010 or 2011 would've meant tying the company down to Microsoft-only technology, not to mention a tricky and expensive database migration.

Even so, the shift from Rackspace servers to Amazon's platform-as-a-service wasn't a straightforward port. It coincided with a shift towards IT componentisation, including a re-architecting of the company's back-end to enable better integration with the front-end, and greater automation.

"I'd looked at Amazon for a long time because I didn't quite trust it - everything seemed so ephemeral. Our back-end had been written for dedicated servers so we had to do a lot of work, which is where we adopted domain-driven design and CQRS (command and query responsibility segregation) as the basis for the company's IT architecture," says Gill.

Domain-driven design, an approach to software development coined by Eric Evans, attempts to encapsulate complex design via creative collaboration between IT and the domain experts using a common vocabulary. CQRS, meanwhile, is the idea that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information.

"The front-end website was completely isolated. We were changing business logic at the back-end and then had to duplicate the work at the front end with a small team. It was creating a lot of work," says Gill. "So we moved the core domain and commands out into an API. Then, Microsoft introduced its portable class libraries (PCL), which are like a subset of .NET that can run on different platforms."

Microsoft's new-found openness under new CEO Satya Nadella has also helped: back in 2011, the PCL technology worked solely on the Microsoft stack, restricting options for making .NET applications to run on Apple iOS (for example) on third-party implementations, such as Xamarin's cross-platform development platform.

"The idea is that you can build discrete libraries, use the packet manager to make components that you just add to new projects," says Gill. Microsoft's change of attitude under Nadella, though, has enabled Watchfinder to deploy Xamarin and to build its own Apple iOS front-ends with which to deliver in-store retail solutions that are fully integrated with the company's stock control systems.

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Precision IT: How Watchfinder CIO Jonathan Gill bet the business on cloud

When Watchfinder.co.uk ran its first TV advertising campaign, CIO Jonathan Gill wondered whether its website would be able to withstand the hoped-for spike in traffic

Componentisation also helps improve business agility, argues Gill. "If I need to go out and get some really flash in-store tech written, which we don't have the skills or the time to build, we can go out and hire a company and say, 'here's the API, here's your keys to access the subset of the data, give us a call if you need any help'."

Stock control

At the time of writing, the most expensive watch for sale on the Watchfinder.co.uk website is a 10-year-old Breguet Grande - a snip at just £57,500. While many people would baulk at spending the price of a terraced house in Cleethorpes on a watch, however nice, it has proven to be a good business for Watchfinder, with sales of more than £140m since it was founded 10 years ago - and a turnover of £36m in 2014 alone.

However, it only really took off with the decision to focus solely on the classic pre-owned watch market in 2008, eschewing the sale of "grey market" watches - because the makers high-end watches only sell them to retailers who can display them in the "right" environment, eschewing online-only retailers - that the company started to take off.

That required a stock management system with a bespoke bar-coding solution so that watches could be tracked right across the company - from procurement, through the reconditioning labs, in storage, right the way through to dispatch. However, high-end watch makers tend to keep their catalogues tightly controlled among authorised retailers and bar codes simply don't exist for most luxury watches produced in the 1960s or 1970s.

This system was devised to reduce the human error inherent in using just serial numbers assigned to stock, while RFID tagging, which ought to be even more effective than bar codes, proved unreliable in practice with read-error rates that were unacceptably high. "The guaranteed read-rate is about 80 per cent," says Gill, "which when you have £2,000-£3,000 watches and you have trays with watches on them worth £100,000 in total is just not good enough."

The bar-coding system enables a tray of watches - with a potential value well into six figures - to be scanned in less than three minutes. And, when people sell their watches to the company, from the moment they print off a label on the website (having acquired a rough valuation from the company) that watch is in the company's stock control system, with its bar code, ready to be tracked the moment it arrives.

Starting out

Gill himself took what might be considered today to be an unorthodox route to the role of IT director. Like many who grew up in the 1980s, he got into computers during the home computer revolution of that decade, with first an Acorn Electron, followed by a Sinclair Spectrum, with which he learnt coding from specialist computer magazines. "When I left school I needed to get a career," says Gill, and he therefore fell into IT rather than doing A-Levels and going to university.

From a short IT training scheme, he took a position at a small manufacturer where the IT manager had set up the IT infrastructure and network fro scratch and needed someone to take over the care and maintenance of the company's IT. "He'd set the network up and wrote all of the in-house software in Visual Basic for DOS - that was the good old days," says Gill.

"He taught me what I needed to know about business software development and once it all 'twigged' in my head, I was off. When he left, the company kept me on as the IT manager at the age of 17 - straight out of school," says Gill. That was 100 PCs with networked printers running Novel Netware 4. "So I taught myself to learn things quickly and get over the fear of breaking things. That made me the sort of IT guy that I am now," he adds.

At that age, when many young programmers would have more likely been into games programming, Gill instead learnt what people needed in order to do their jobs, and how the programs and coding he was developing could do that - and discovered he was quite good at it. At the age of 21, he was effectively IT manager at a firm of accountants in Leeds, before moving into coding.

The move to become IT director at Watchfinder.co.uk started out as a favour to the founders that quickly got out of hand: very soon, Gill was doing his proper work during the day and helping them set up their IT systems, both internal and web-facing, by night and at the weekend, too.

"I was working all day on software in my day job, and then I was working for Watchfinder in the evening... so the choices were either to get them in as clients for the company that I was working for, which would probably have been too expensive, or going to work for Watchfinder," says Gill. And the job offer also included shares in the new company, too.

"What sold it for me was the attitude of the founders. We're all ambitious, and we've all got the same drive and the same ethos. And we all got on, as well," says Gill.