SUCCESS STORY CASE STUDY

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1 SUCCESS STORY Music venue and fine-dining business, City Winery, turned to Cogeco Peer 1 when it needed a new hosting partner that could keep up with its growing business. The move has resulted in outstanding website performance, increased reliability during peak traffic periods and an increase in sales. CASE STUDY CITY WINERY City Winery is a chain of clubs in New York, Chicago, Nashville and Atlanta (opening June of 2016), with a new venue set to open in Boston towards the end of The clubs are unique in that they offer fine dining and wine and music acts in intimate venues. The typical head count for any one club is approximately 300 people. Performers range from well-known musicians such as Elvis Costello, to Sean Watkins and Anoushka Shankar. The company is the brainchild of Michael Dorf, founder of the Knitting Factory, one of New York s longest running music venues.

2 Dorf wanted to create a space in Manhattan where he could combine his shared passions for wine and music, which gave birth to City Winery. Location United States Industry Hospitality Web Site Solution Magento E-Commerce City Winery was losing revenue and receiving negative reviews on social media because its Magento site was failing over when lots of concurrent users tried to make purchases. It made a move to Cogeco Peer 1 as its hosting partner. Using their Magento expertise Cogeco Peer 1 made a raft of improvements. They not only solved the problem but scaled up the number of concurrent users that could use the site. The platform now delivers a smooth experience for users, from logging onto the site, through to checkout, and City Winery is no longer experiencing problems. The result is business growth and a platform for future expansion. City Winery uniquely combines culinary and cultural experience to create intimate concerts. It provides food and wine classes and produces 20 in-house wines. Its cuisine is inspired by the Mediterranean, chiefly Italian, French, Spanish and Middle-Eastern cultures. THE CHALLENGE The company s shop window is its website. Customers book tickets, buy wines, arrange events and make reservations all via the company s ecommerce platform. Every Tuesday and Thursday, a newsletter is sent to approximately 300,000 customers in its database informing them of the upcoming musicians and events. These newsletters are central to City Winery s business and, following their distribution, there is a predictable surge in demand for venue tickets. However, the company s website was struggling to deal with these peaks in user demand and surges in performance requirements, resulting in the website capping out at 300 concurrent users, insufficient for peak volumes of customers. Pages would not load and transactions were lost, said Garrett Larrow, National Director, Online Experience, City Winery, If we can t handle traffic when we re announcing big shows or sending newsletters across three time zones, we lose business. In addition to revenue loss, frustrated customers were also ing in to our concierge very upset when they couldn t checkout as well as some negative word of mouth about their experience. We built on Magento Enterprise, with a customized ticketing platform on the backend, to allow us to own our ticketing system and seating maps so we didn t have to outsource to companies like Ticketmaster. It was definitely the correct platform for our needs, but without the support of an experienced hosting partner, the system wasn t functioning as it had the potential to, Larrow explained. THE SOLUTION Like all enterprise solutions, Magento Enterprise delivers its best performance on an infrastructure optimized to its exacting requirements. With Cogeco Peer 1, City Winery gained a true partner, allowing them to maintain their focus on growing the overall business. Designing the functional requirements of the Magento application is only part of the package; it is the expertise in infrastructure

3 architecture and implementation of large deployments that ultimately enables the kind of scalability and growth that allows merchants like City Winery to meet the demands of a growing business. Cogeco Peer 1 really understood what we needed and were very upfront with us. At the same time Cogeco Peer 1 has in-depth Magento experience and a lot of expertise in the team. Following a series of meetings and tests we decided to go with Cogeco Peer 1 because in addition to their expertise, they instilled a lot of confidence. They carried out a load-balancing test, showed us how it would work and stood by their claims, said Garrett Larrow. The Cogeco Peer 1 ecommerce team offered City Winery infrastructure expertise, trained by Magento on platform scalability best practices to become an extension of the Solution Partners. Cogeco Peer 1 then provided City Winery with a hand-picked team of specialists dedicated to help optimize its Magento platform to ensure it got the very best from the technology. This included a dedicated Magento system administrator, technical support and customer experience manager. We take the time to really learn about the business and then we dedicated resources to development and testing of their solution to see how we could further customize and enhance performance, says Jeff Bonham, Sales, Cogeco Peer 1.

4 Bonham added, We worked with our database administrators and internal Magento team to make sure we could provide the required number of concurrent sessions without having to purchase additional licences, and then load tested the entire solution to make sure it performed to our standards. SUCCESSFUL SWITCH The move to Cogeco Peer 1 has been extremely successful. With one web, data and admin server and one Magento license, City Winery has increased the number of concurrent users the system will hold to approximately 800, well above its 300 benchmark. And importantly there are absolutely no issues, pages load rapidly and customers are supported from log on to check out by a flawless web experience. PLATFORM IMPROVEMENTS One of City Winery s main objectives was to be able to handle concurrent users at peak times just after its newsletters are released. This has been achieved but there have also been further benefits. Garrett Larrow explains, Magento is actually now a lot faster thanks to the improvements that have been made by Cogeco Peer 1. There has been no downtime and revenues have increased. We couldn t have asked for more. BUSINESS GROWTH Critically the move to Cogeco Peer 1 has seen an increase in business, while the negative customer feedback has stopped. Furthermore the robustness of the Cogeco Peer 1 platform is providing the foundation for future business growth. Garrett Larrow says, If I was to sum up the benefits I would say the move has been great for business. We re not losing revenue, transactions are completed seamlessly, and we re back on top. And importantly we re no longer receiving lots of bad s in to our concierge or negative word of mouth. We can now confidently grow the business and engage with our customer base positively. EXPANSION PLANS With four existing venues, and a new one opening soon, the company is also sizing-up other locations. Its aim is to have about ten venues within the next few years and its website and ecommerce platform must be able to support this business growth. Our experience with Cogeco Peer 1 is absolutely positive. As such we have complete confidence in scaling up. At the moment we re happy with 600 to 700 concurrent users but we will be looking at

5 around 1,400 users and we know that with Cogeco Peer 1 we can accomplish this easily, says Garrett Larrow. UNRIVALLED SUPPORT AND STRONG RELATIONSHIP The support provided by Cogeco Peer 1 to City Winery is unrivalled. Garrett Larrow adds, I pushed hard to move to Cogeco Peer 1 because they really understood our business, had a genuine interest in our model and were willing to help out and think about the future of City Winery. Given our expansion plans, staying up to speed on evolving technologies is important, and Cogeco Peer 1 are also supporting us in this. About Cogeco Peer 1 Cogeco Peer 1 are wholly-owned subsidiaries of Cogeco Cable Inc. (TSX:CCA). They have combined their operations to become a global provider of essential business-to-business products and services, such as data transport, colocation, cloud and managed services, and dedicated hosting, that allow customers across Canada, the United States and Western Europe to focus on their core business. With 21 data centres, extensive FastFiber Network and more than 50 points-of-presence in North America and Europe combined, they are a trusted partner to businesses small, medium and large, providing the ability to access, move, manage and store mission-critical data worldwide, backed by superior customer support. To learn more about how our Content Distribution Services can help your organization, please visit Ready to learn more? Streamline your IT with Cogeco Peer 1. Visit cogecopeer1.com Order Now / Cogeco Peer 1