USER SUCCESS/ PETMEDS
F or 20 years, PetMeds sat atop a legacy platform that did its job but demanded a heavy tax on innovation. As a mid-market leader generating around $300 million in annual revenue, the company found itself at a familiar crossroads. It needed to scale, but the legacy technol- ogy stack had become an anchor. When Umesh Sripad arrived as CTO of Pet- Meds, he and his team chose to deploy a fragmented, best-of-breed architecture where every piece—from Salesforce for commerce to SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud for finance—does exactly what it was built to do, without being twisted into something it isn’t. SAPinsider sat down with Sripad just six weeks before his team’s major Go-Live. In a candid conversation, he opened up about the nightmare of cus- tomization, the three frameworks he uses to filter scope creep, and why he believes leadership involvement is the only thing standing between a Clean Core and a technical debt disaster. SAPinsider: Many CTOs seek a single silver-bullet platform. You took a deliberate, fragmented approach to your architecture. Why? Umesh Sripad: We had to step back and look at the backend core of any e-commerce business. Generally, an e-commerce business has five critical components: a commerce engine, an Or- der Management System (OMS), inven- tory planning, a Warehouse Management System (WMS), and financial systems. SAP supports all of them. We took a fragmented solution ap- proach because we needed to be faster. Therefore, for our commerce engine and OMS, we went with Salesforce because it was the right fit for those specific needs at that time—commerce and OMS work very well together there. However, once we proved that the technology launch was successful, we still had to integrate the inventory and financial systems. That’s where the choice became clear. We needed an ERP that could tackle
The No-Customization Transformation Umesh Sripad, CTO at PetMeds, on how the company modernized by refusing to break the core.
By Radhika Ojha
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