Sometimes, innovation is born in the midst of a crisis. Unexpected challenges and a sense of urgency force companies to look for new ways of keeping the business going, even as the odds stack up against them. This was the case for one of our biggest customers Matalan, a major fashion and homeware retailer in the U.K. The company operates 230 brick and mortar stores across the country, and 30 international franchise stores within Europe and the Middle East. It also maintains a thriving online channel that runs on the SHIFT platform.

We recently sat down for a chat with Bill Curtis, a co-founder and the CTO of Sweet Tooth (Now Smile.io), a points and rewards app for online stores worldwide.

What has been your greatest challenge?

We’re serving way more data today than we ever have, so scaling is mission-critical. In the past, we’ve struggled with traffic spikes. For example, there are seasonal spikes, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. There are also spikes from merchant activity, such as load testing stores or importing a large number of orders.

I recently tweeted our requests-per-hour graph. It showed that during the huge spikes for this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, our product availability was seamless on...