METRO migrates to Google Cloud Platform
German-company METRO, one of the world’s largest B2B wholesalers and food specialists, chose to migrate to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in order improve its customers’ experience and better fulfil their needs.
Dr. Werner Rath, METRONOM's Unit Owner IT Operations, said: "The industries we supply tend to have fixed ways of working. Until recently, orders were still often made by telephone, or even fax. But when that started to change, we decided to fully embrace digitalization, with a close focus on our customers and their needs."
METRO did this by migrating its ecommerce platform to the cloud, allowing it to deliver a more stable, as well as scalable, service for both its customers and its workforce. It also developed a new data lake with GCP.
According to Sven Lipowski, Unit Owner Customer Solutions at METRONOM, the data lake “managed services and integrated analytics and machine learning lets us further develop our products based on far more precise observation points and therefore serve our customers better."
Dr. Werner Rath discussed the choice of GCP: "We loved the way Compute Engine offered a generic approach to VMs. It's a simpler, more practical setup. Instead of a huge range of VM types that need upgrading every few months, we just match memory and CPU to workloads, and leave the VMs to get on with it.”
“At the same time, the simple costing model means we can configure machines as we need them, without worrying about a major cost impact."
When migrating its ecommerce to Compute Engine, METRO utilised Virtual Private Cloud to easily integrate it with its existing backend systems. According to Dr. Rath, this enabled the company to reduce infrastructure costs by between 30 to 50 per cent, drastically reduce its VM reboots, while outages and instability were down by up to 80 per cent.
METRO has ramped up its data lake, increasing its daily intake of events by 45 times, from 1.2 million events a day in October 2018, to 54 million in January 2019, while its ecommerce platform is now line in 14 countries. The company has announced it is migrating its SAP S/4HANA finance systems to GCP.
