Ally Fashion is an Australia based young ladies fashion destination providing value, quality and fashionable outfits through an enthusiastic, fun, and professional team. Ally first opened its doors in Sydney in 2001 and now has 140+ physical stores as well as an online store. With a customer base ranging between the ages of 18-35 and large shipments of new styles arriving weekly, Ally is a fast fashion institute that is constantly scouring the globe for new trends, hot style tips and catwalk inspired pieces.

Ally is continually growing and looking out for new and exciting looks with an average of 50+ styles introduced into the retail outlets each week. Every store carries a minimum of 300 styles and 5000 pieces of stock at any given time with a weekly markdown system to ensure that the new and fresh trends coming through are housed in prime spots within the store.

Aging hardware had been causing a few headaches for some time with multiple outages on hardware and networking. A number of the IT team from China was also locked out of their system for several days. This aging problem and a plan to move to a cloud based model highlighted to Ally Fashion that engaging a cloud provider would deliver some clear benefits to the business. After contacting a number of other providers who had not been able to find a solution, Ally Fashion spoke to Alibaba Cloud who discussed a physical server to cloud migration as well as several other potential infrastructure services.

"In simple terms, Alibaba Cloud provides the scalability and performance with the best value investment for our requirements." says Rodger Yang, Head of IT at Ally Fashion. "Alibaba Cloud has been very supportive to our cause during our partnership, and remain a key vendor to our technology strategy as we continue to expand our presence in country".

The partnership began after some initial discussions turned into a proof of concept (POC) and then a migration at no cost to Ally Fashion in order to demonstrate the capability of Alibaba Cloud. The migration process was completed with minimal impact on the business allowing Roger and the team to focus on building the business itself.

Ally Fashion will continue to build its business and plans on opening a number of new stores in the future. There are also some digital marketplace enhancements in the pipeline which will enable Ally Fashion to better connect with its customers and continue to merge the offline and online retail worlds. Ally Fashion sees the future in a unified world where customers seamlessly move between online and offline and brands deliver an innovative, intuitive and convenient shopping experience to consumers who want to engage with them.