Kingfisher goes multi-cloud with Google Cloud partnership

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Kingfisher, a global home improvement company with over 1,500 stores and 80,000 employees has announced a new, five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to enhance its digital capabilities and usher in the next digital age for retail.

One of the largest SAP enterprise users in Europe, Kingfisher has started migrating its on-premise workloads to the Google Cloud and with a multi-cloud strategy.

Adopting Google Cloud’s infrastructure, platform services, and artificial intelligence solutions will allow Kingfisher to streamline its existing ecommerce platform, while experimenting with advanced testing environments at much lower cost, and will provide faster and more direct access to existing data.

The company will also achieve greater website uptime, better forecasting, more seamless customer-centric experiences, improved personalization, engineering support and be able to attract and retain engineering talent.

New projects for this partnership include re-platforming the Screwfix ecommerce site, to make it one-hundred times faster and deliver the fastest non-food delivery service worldwide, and scaling up B&Q’s online marketplace, from 300,000 products online to more than four million in the coming years.

A new, real-time order system is also on the cards for Kingfisher, improving stock accuracy and enabling visual search capabilities on Google Cloud AI to help customers discover product replacements.

“At Kingfisher, we have an ambitious technology strategy in place. Google Cloud is an engineering organization at its heart, while simultaneously understanding the complex retail landscape. As we look to the next phase of growth and the kind of talent we want to attract, this meeting of minds was a real draw for us,” said JJ Van Oosten, chief digital and technology officer at Kingfisher.

“To reach our goal of creating a world-class engineering center, we need a technology stack that will support us to experiment and move quickly. Google Cloud is helping to position us as a true digital leader, and our global teams and customers will benefit as a result.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said: “We’re proud to work with Kingfisher to optimize, accelerate, and grow its ambitions. Partnering with global retail leaders like Kingfisher to help create even better in-store and online shopping experiences for customers is a key indicator of the power of the cloud to digitally transform retail.”