Shannon O'Brien, Chief Innovation & Technology Officer – Poolwerx explained how technology and business adaptations have become complex for their home service franchise business. Poolwerx, one of the world's largest pool and hot tub / spa maintenance providers, was founded 30 years ago in Australia, with 630 service vans and 165 retail stores in Australia, New Zealand and the US. He highlighted the four main complexities: business adaptations, franchising model, geographical expansion, and pools. As a pool company, the seasonal revenue drop was smoothed out by providing commercial services for different industries, and opening retail stores, which allowed Poolwerx to become a hub and spoke model. The franchising model brought hierarchy, where each franchisee had specific access to data, making technology selection more complex. Lastly, Poolwerx had to adapt to the US culture before expanding its business.

Andrew Gerasimov, VP of Customer Success & Expert Consulting – Spryker and Shannon discussed the evolution of sophisticated digital commerce and how Spryker enables its customers to benefit from new opportunities in industries that are transforming. Their conversation highlighted how the customer experience is set by the biggest companies and the experience they deliver (such as Amazon or Uber), before exploring why smaller enterprises need to deliver the same exceptional experiences. Andrew and Shannon then discussed how Spryker is helping Poolwerx to achieve this with an API-first approach. This allows the use of IoT data in an actionable way while easily configurable complex workflows support advanced order management. Shannon also discussed the company's high-level architecture and explained that Spryker, which is the brain of the architecture, acts as a flow of data between the company's many systems. It's this headless architecture that enables Poolwerx to design world class experiences for its clients.