Kingfisher teams with Google Cloud as it looks to achieve true digital leader status
Kingfisher and Google Cloud have announced a five-year strategic partnership.
The former, whose brand portfolio includes B&Q, Castorama, Screwfix, Brico Dépôt and Koçtaş, will tap Google Cloud’s infrastructure, platform services, and artificial intelligence solutions, Kingfisher.
It says that benefits will include greater website uptime, better forecasting, more seamless customer centric experiences, improved personalisation, and engineering support from Google Cloud.
Kingfisher is one of the largest SAP enterprise users in Europe and is migrating on-premise legacy workloads to Google Cloud.
“We have an ambitious technology strategy in place. Google Cloud is an engineering organisation at its heart, while simultaneously understanding the complex retail landscape,” says JJ Van Oosten, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Kingfisher.
“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.”
“To reach our goal of creating a world class engineering centre, 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.”
Projects for this new partnership will include replatforming the Screwfix e-commerce site to make it 100 times faster.
Meanwhile, the B&Q brand will now be able to scale up from 300,000 products online to more than four million in the coming years, thanks to the growth of its online marketplace.
In addition, Kingfisher plans to create a new, real-time order system that will improve stock accuracy, and deploy visual search using Google Cloud AI tools to help customers discover the product replacements that most closely match their needs.
“We’re proud to work with Kingfisher to optimise, 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,” says Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud.
