21 October 2015

First Great Western Railway has rebranded as it aims to put the romance back into train travel.

Great Western Railway (GWR) will use a managed virtualisation solution to support its recent rebrand and maintain the best possible service for customers.

Owned by the FirstGroup, GWR is said to operate one of the UK’s largest and most complex rail networks.

In September, FirstGroup started the process of ‘un-branding’ the business by changing its marque from First Great Western to Great Western Railway – the famous name used when it was originally founded in 1833 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. 

A rebrand of everything from the corporate logo to staff uniforms is at the heart of the company’s goal to bring the romance back to railway and inspire the public to travel by rail during their leisure time as well as for commuting.

GWR plans to invest £7.5 billion in improvements to its network infrastructure and rolling stock. A central part of this involves boosting the reliability and performance of its website which was struggling during the firm’s busiest period which runs from October to February. 

As a result, GWR decided to change its hosting provider. It selected a solution involving both physical and virtual servers hosted in Rackspace’s data centre in Crawley, Sussex, to power its online rollout whilst coping with sudden or planned traffic peaks.

GWR says more than 1.5 million passengers use its services each week and with most of them now buying their tickets online, the company is also aiming to be the UK’s number one digital retailer for travel ticketing. It has therefore transformed its e-commerce platform with the help of digital agency ORM and Sitecore, a digital marketing software vendor.

Sitecore’s Experience platform is helping GWR create a website that can be personalised through the use of Big Data analytics. The platform has built a profile of each customer which creates a number of tailored features including journey suggestions; even the site’s imagery can be used to reflect a desirable location that the customer may want to travel to. GWR sees this as a way of inspiring the public to use the railway, and adds that it’s also profitable as each personalised transaction is worth more than a regular transaction.

The company is using a disaster recovery solution at Rackspace’s data centre so that backup infrastructure is always available to power its website. Rackspace says dedicated hardware is also used to provide high reliability, whilst delivering scalability by allowing the rail network to spin up servers instantly. In addition, load balancers are used to help handle traffic spikes. 

GWR’s digital marketing manager Jason Ali says the support offered by Rackspace, ORM and Sitecore gives the company peace of mind that it has the right infrastructure in place in order to give customers the “best possible start” to their journeys. 

He adds: ”Rackspace has provided access to an on call lead engineer who’s become an expert, not only in servers, but Great Western Railway’s servers, right down to the finest details of the infrastructure.”