ADEO Group connects goods to services with Aiven

The global ADEO home improvement conglomerate uses an Apache Kafka driven infrastructure to enable omnichannel shopping experiences.

Overview

ADEO group is the third-largest player in the global home improvement market. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in France, ADEO serves more than 450 million customers in 15 countries and has revolutionized home improvement and the do-it-yourself endeavor via massive scale and a simple raison d’être: “to feel useful in everything we do - useful to ourselves, to those around us, to others, and to the world.”

The challenge

The overarching mission runs deep in the group’s psyche and informs how things are done internally. However, with data siloed across headquarters and multiple departments in a community of 32 companies, being useful in everything is easier said than done. These entities, whose data is scattered among thousands of on-premises databases, integrate with the ADEO website as well as more than 700 brick and mortar stores.

A core challenge has been the need to transform this reality into a cloud-based, unified model of data without interrupting the day-to-day data operations of a group serving millions of customers while fulfilling modern use-cases.

The traditional use-cases included supply chain and inventory management, service provider and customer relations — with data typically time-segmented and siloed by location. Today, the group has added real-time, comprehensive data analytics to the mix. “We’re evolving toward a data analytics-based understanding of what we sell in the store to better understand and predict the habits of our customers,” Julien Charlot, Head of Databases and Middleware says. “We want to connect the services to the goods people buy. So now, the application will really evolve; we can go from more traditional use-cases to new cloud- and platform-company use cases...and we need to be able to connect all of our applications.”

"We want to connect the services to the goods people buy."

Julien Charlot

Head of Databases at Adeo

The solution

At the cusp of a massive transformation, the data team started running just a few Kafka services, and soon began to realize just how much more easily they could meet their goals with hosted, managed cloud services.

“One year ago, we needed our team to be able to deliver database services really, really quickly.” Julien says that once the group started to use Aiven’s managed, hosted services for use-cases across the board, “We were able to deliver databases in the cloud and set the entire transformation process within 2-3 months. Even less.”

Today, ADEO group runs hundreds of Aiven services, including PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, MySQL and Apache Kafka across headquarters as well as all business units and stores.

The outcome

One major catalyst for such a quick transformation was the flexibility ensured by Aiven’s cloud-agnosticism, which helped the ADEO group avoid the pitfalls and hard-coupling of vendor lock-in. Julien explained that within certain territories, some cloud providers may not be available, but the workaround was to simply one-click deploy to a different one.

These capabilities are essential for a unified but globally distributed group of companies. He added, “With Aiven, we saw some features we did not see directly with the various cloud providers,” including latest versions, backup management, and end-to-end data security.

Finally, Julien emphasizes that the personable collaboration with Aiven on feature delivery is important. “For me, the relationship with Aiven is a really strong point. We can make feature requests very easily, like availability monitoring.”

With Aiven, the groups’ data infrastructure has advanced from a siloed, time-segmented, on-premise setup to a centrally managed, real-time, and extremely flexible cloud model, allowing development speed on an entirely new level.

For them, this was a major strategic move which, with Aiven, was surprisingly easy. With these sweeping process and resource changes, Aiven has helped the groups’ information capabilities scale to the future and beyond.

"We were able to deliver databases in the cloud and set the entire transformation process within 2-3 months."

Julien Charlot

Head of Databases at Adeo

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