Fashion brand modernises and cuts costs with Google Cloud migration
Pimkie is a French-based fashion brand aimed at women in the 18-25 age bracket and one of six businesses in the FashionCube group. The company has an international presence, with 664 shops worldwide, 38 million garments sold annually, a presence in 22 countries and six websites.
Faced with the need to remain competitive in the constantly evolving fashion market, Pimkie decided to modernise its outdated IT infrastructure by migrating to Google Cloud. This began with an assessment of the company’s existing infrastructure, which included two on-premises data centres, utilising tools such as Google StratoZone.
This enabled Google Cloud to see that the data centres needed to be closed by the end of 2021 and the team quickly drew up a cost-effective plan to meet that deadline. Google Enterprise Account Manager Bertrand Autin said: "By understanding exactly what was in the data centers, we could develop a business case to demonstrate a return on investment based on committed use discount.”
Autin added: “We were able to show Pimkie how our lift-and-modernize approach would both save them money and improve the services they offer”.
The migration involved moving Pimkie’s technical infrastructure to Google Cloud using VMs on Google Compute Engine. Overall, the migration saw 75 workloads shifted to the cloud, an additional 75 workloads replatformed and ensured all applications were in line with security requirements.
Ultimately, the entire migration project, including the migration of around 300 VMs, was completed within 12 months. The greater scalability, agility and security offered by Google Cloud has helped Pimkie to deliver around €300,000 in cost savings, approximately a 70 per cent saving compared to maintaining its on-premises systems.
Moving forward, Pimkie will continue to work with Google Cloud to further solidify and optimise its operations, with the initial migration seen as the first step towards ultimately migrating all of FashionCube’s brands to the cloud.
Bertrand Autin concluded: "The next step is a global FashionCube cloud that creates an even more agile and scalable infrastructure. The objective is to bring everything together to create better offerings for FashionCube customers that drive the business."
