Yottaa is a SaaS platform designed to optimize enterprise online retail websites, so brands can deliver faster, better online shopping experiences. The platform’s suite of tools provides deep optimization and analytics that help retailers fine-tune their website even further. Some of the biggest global brands run their websites on Yottaa, including Carter’s, Ralph Lauren, Lenovo, and GNC. Fastly helps Yottaa to deliver consistent, high quality user experiences that give brands higher conversions and more engaged shoppers.
yottaa.com
Industry: High tech
Location: Waltham, MA
Customer since: 2019
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Yottaa’s secret sauce is its ability to optimize the browser experience. The platform sequences and manages the loading of 3rd party services and uses machine learning to improve the way websites serve dynamic content. Yottaa also collects a massive amount of performance, traffic, and site error data that allows the platform to continuously machine learn and improve its optimizations and provide comprehensive analytics for customers.
Yottaa began using Fastly in early 2019 as part of a multi-CDN architecture. Yottaa would constantly run performance testing against each of the CDNs and switch customers to different providers as part of their regular operations. After moving to Fastly, Yottaa saw a noticeable improvement in performance, so they began shifting more and more traffic over to Fastly.
Fastly’s edge compute technology is deeply integrated into the Yottaa platform. Yottaa sees Fastly as an important partner complementary to their core service, because Fastly helps Yottaa deliver on the speed and quality that shoppers expect. The integration gives Yottaa engineers access to the Fastly API, as well as to Fastly’s cache management and data capture capabilities.
Through Yottaa, brands can have both fast sites and great online experiences, resulting in higher conversion rates. Not only can brands control all digital assets in the browser, but the Yottaa platform monitors performance data coming from every customer website and every page load across all devices, browsers, and networks. Additionally, anomaly AI detects problems in real-time and the platform resolves issues when they arise.
Many retailers see seasonal spikes in traffic during the holidays or other times that are specific to their industry. Fastly’s edge cloud network helps Yottaa maintain their target metrics more easily during peak times by caching and delivering content at the network edge. This helps to prevent bottlenecks and errors and provide shoppers with consistent, smooth experiences regardless of traffic demands. Since partnering with Fastly, Yottaa has seen a dramatic improvement in page load time.
“With Fastly, our customers’ page load times are up to 450 milliseconds faster than with other CDN solutions.”
Rich Stendardo
CEO
In addition to customer metrics, Yottaa also keeps an eye on their own infrastructure performance, like request throughput, bandwidth, and cache hit ratio. This enables them to better control costs and find ways to better leverage partner services. Fastly has helped them optimize their platform and improve several key areas:
“Fastly’s Instant Purge™ feature helps us to ensure that our customers are showing new content on their websites as quickly as possible.”
Michael Maberry
Vice President of Operations
The path to Yottaa’s performance data is straightforward. The platform ingests data using Kafka endpoints, processes it through an Elasticsearch cluster, and then visualizes it in their UI for easy querying. Fastly’s real-time log streaming features provide greater visibility into platform performance and enable Yottaa to make faster, data-driven decisions.
When an issue arises at the edge, Fastly’s real-time alerting and signaling helps Yottaa’s customer success team troubleshoot quickly. Historical logging provides a broad overview of performance trends and opportunities for optimization. Is the Yottaa platform handling more or less traffic than Fastly? Is content caching correctly? Such insights help the Yottaa customer success team scale to handle traffic surges and new customers.
“Fastly’s easy-to-use dashboard allows us to quickly dig into individual requests that are erroring or having issues, which is very helpful during customer onboarding.”
Ben Trafton
Vice President of Client Services
Looking beyond regular operations, Yottaa is exploring more ways to use Fastly’s edge computing features to improve their customer and technical metrics. Forward caching static content, such as JavaScript libraries, can help further improve response times and cache hit ratios. Sharing performance data can drive greater collaboration on analytics with customers. With the Fastly integration in place and running smoothly, Yottaa can now further extend its core value to ecommerce brands and shoppers.
“When we deployed Fastly, we were able to offer a ‘one-two punch’ — retailers get everything they need to optimize their website, and they can see the benefits right away.”
Rich Stendardo
CEO