Cloud Transformation in Retail

Seismic shifts in consumer behaviour have produced huge challenges and once-in-a-generation opportunities for today’s online retailers. The entire retailing environment has been turbocharged, with businesses embracing technology to forge new and deeper relationships with their customers. As strategists respond to the retail renaissance, maximising flexibility, growing sales and minimising risk of uncertainty are top of mind.

The power of the cloud to address these challenges is beyond doubt. It’s driving innovation and growth at an unprecedented scale and pace, it’s opening up new markets, creating rich customer and employee experiences and enabling agile development, trialling and launch of new apps and services at a dizzying speed.

It’s great for business economics too. There’s cost-efficient flexibility to scale up and down to meet seasonal and market demands and to capitalise quickly on great ideas, overall operational cost reductions and budget transparency, streamlined business processes, enhanced data security and business continuity. Cloud leaders are able to recruit and retain top talent, excited by a culture of innovation. And it’s elevated IT to a dynamic, strategic business enabler, across the enterprise.

Capgemini, your partner of choice for cloud transformation.

Capgemini is uniquely capable of combining the three essential ingredients that enable you to maximize the business value of the cloud:

• A comprehensive, end-to-end, strategic approach, that defines your vision and business objectives first, enabling a precise design and specification of your cloud journey and solutions.
• A collaborative spirit that empowers great teamworking among all leaders and executives, business units, supply chain partners and industry experts, to create and execute your cloud strategy.
• World-class cloud expertise on a global scale, with a full spectrum of cloud and change management tools, techniques and services, a vendor-neutral approach to technology providers, and the ability to build a tailored roadmap for your entire cloud transformation journey.

But while the fruits of a cloud transformation can be spectacular, for almost all retail businesses there are big decisions to make, many complexities to overcome, skill shortages to fill, disconnected legacy systems and vendor contracts to unpick, and priceless data to protect
and secure.

Your cloud transformation requires a vision, robust business case and strategy, comprehensively
planned and executed migration and a cost-effective, long-term operating model. So why not work with a partner with all of those interconnected skills, and more – and vast experience of delivering them in retail environments too, with an outstanding record of cloud transformation success stories?

Capgemini shifts the focus away from IT infrastructure to your business goals and aspirations and how you can utilise the cloud to streamline your business and delight your customers of the future. We invest in innovative commercial models that reduce risk, to simplify complexity, secure and accelerate your success and provide the platform for you to outpace your competitors.

Our global track record

We’ve delivered thousands of successful cloud transformations, for global brands and smaller enterprises too. For example:

• Coke One North America – we’ve planned and managed a huge and complex SAP migration to Microsoft Azure for Coca-Cola’s bottling business, delivering cost savings, improved reliability, lower latency and improved security for a platform that handles 160,000 orders a day, worth $21 billion a year.
• Global Luxury Fashion House – we’ve executed a migration of our prestigious client’s SAP systems and applications as well as around 20TB of data to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, synchronising retail, finance, HR, supply chain, and data and insights processes. The result is reduced costs, improved responsiveness and agility, and far greater future opportunities for innovation.
• Home Office – In one of the largest cloud transformation projects for the UK government, Capgemini managed a migration to the AWS platform, while maintaining business continuity. Build times were reduced from two days to one hour, weekly incident volume was cut by 35%, and a new development environment was built in less than four hours, reduced from two weeks. Savings for the public purse from improved certificate management and licensing alone exceed £100 million per year.
• Large furniture retail chain –advanced analytics using Google Cloud’s AI platform provide improved customer communications that are context based, personalised and delivered in real-time,with customer analytics to manage the leads via email.

Capgemini’s proven cloud expertise

• We have more than 2,200 certified global cloud specialists, distilling vast experience and expertise from diverse business sectors and geographies, for the benefit of each individual client.
• We’re platform agnostic, partnering with the world’s leading technology providers, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
• We have invested heavily in tooling and intellectual property. Our economic Application Portfolio Management eAPM toolset and cloud platform are recognised by Gartner and ISG as industry leading and designed to help you maximise your cloud experience in an innovative and cost-effective way.
• We’ve developed market leading reusable retail assets and apply every lesson learnt from each engagement. Our advanced frameworks and accelerators are specific to retail environments, minimising disruption and focusing on your business.
• Our global cloud capabilities are recognised by analysts including Gartner and Forrester.

Collaboration and innovation is in our DNA.

• Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) is a global network and a rich and diverse ecosystem that delivers a high-performance innovation engagement experience through a portfolio of more than 20 distinct services that span the breadth of the applied innovation process.
• The AIE drives tangible business outcomes by applying innovation in ways that are meaningful to the business and able to drive tangible value and competitive edge.
• Meanwhile, more than a third of FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 businesses use our Accelerated Solutions Environments, to bring global experts together to solve complex business challenges at high speed.
• For comprehensive details of how Capgemini makes digital business a reality for retailers, through cloud and application technologies, take a look at our digital handbook for retail CIOs.