Carrefour’s IT ecommerce group chose the Convertigo Mashup Server, which enabled the IT team to utilize innovative integration technology to deploy a mission-critical mobile shopping app in seven weeks.

Carrefour is first in the retail industry to deliver a continuous user experience between PC and smartphones. Customers can start online shopping on a PC and complete it on a mobile handset, or vice versa.

*Good for you, great for everybody

“Time to market was key. If we would have used traditional integration methods, we estimate it would have required 6 to 8 times more money and time.” Hervé Thoumyre CIO, Carrefour

Challenges

To increase market share and remain competitive, retailers must continuously enhance the customer experience.  Today, this experience must be as strong online as offline.

Seeking a solution to enable customers to fill in their cart from various electronic devices they use throughout the day.

The Carrefour IT team faced the typical resource challenges of large global retailers:  how could it deliver such an innovative IT project internally and externally, and within reasonable timeframes and budgets?

In addition, Carrefour needed to synchronize development efforts across four different IT teams located in different business units and subsidiaries.  And each team had its respective project backlogs.

Objectives:

• Differentiate from competition. Be first to market with a new multi-device shopping process.
• Set a new standard for integration projects at Carrefour.
• Mix difficult-to-access business applications and data.
• Retain all business logic within the back end so that Carrefour can easily adapt to the exploding number of mobile handset models.
• Reduce IT pressure by using new technologies for more agility and reactivity.

Solution

As an agile platform residing within the middleware layer, the Convertigo Mashup Server exposes and orchestrates the best of existing application for a new generation of applications and usages. Convertigo outperforms alternative solutions with this capability, which enables the reuse of all existing systems without modification or additional coding.

With Convertigo, Carrefour completed the project in record time and on an extremely efficient budget. Below are the technical details of the deployment:

Convertigo is used as a central platform to connect and mix different sources via the following C-EMS modules:

• C-EMS WEB integrator converts without coding, delivering the Ooshop application into a complex web service able to execute simple and complex orchestrated real-time transactions (read and write).
• C-EMS XML/SQL connector pushes and pulls information from specific databases.
• C-EMS Sequencer mixes and serves different sources into one "intelligent" service.
• C-EMS Legacy integrator could be used in the future to engage with partner and supplier mainframes.

In-between i-phones and Carrefour applications, Convertigo is serving and exposing multiple business processes into one compact service which can be consume on any device.

At this time, a C-EMS license for one dual-core machine is enough to handle 100 simultaneous transactions. Carrefour chose an on-premise internal installation, Convertigo servers are also available in the Convertigo elastic cloud to scale on demand.

Reasons for this choice:

• Short term: deliver a mobile app mixing heterogeneous business apps in record time
• Mid and Long term: Use Convertigo as an agile middleware component to deal with the myriad of back end business applications and front end devices

François Pereira, IT Multichannel & Online Group Director, says, “Convertigo solutions delivers promises from performances and reliability perspectives. We now plan to use the Convertigo Mashup Server for other projects inside Carrefour because of the non-intrusive way Convertigo is providing.”

Results

Time to market: Carrefour set a new record for the time required to deliver an innovative integration project.

Total cost of ownership: With Convertigo, data and business logic can be natively integrated using innovative technology that accesses the source from the front end, and without coding.  This means a drastically reduced cost structure for integration projects.

Customer satisfaction: Carrefour provides customers with powerful apps and innovative features that other retailers don’t have.

A new standard platform for other integration projects: The Convertigo Mashup Server is ideal for countless other integration projects inside the enterprise.

Other highlights: Mobile-specific revenues streams are created as users adopt the new application, which provides a fast, easy and responsive user experience made possible by Convertigo’s technology. Carrefour is already benefiting from increased market visibility, and has also established a new competitive advantage.

About Carrefour: 

Over the past 50 years, the Carrefour group has grown to become one of the world’s leading distribution groups. The world’s second-largest retailer and the largest in Europe, the group currently operates four main grocery store formats: hypermarkets, supermarkets, hard discount and convenience stores. The Carrefour group currently has over 15,500 stores, either company-operated or franchises.

About Convertigo: 

Convertigo delivers Mashup solutions to enterprises. The Convertigo EMS provides a platform to create composite applications from legacy (green screen) applications, unstructured Web sites, and SOA APIs. This is accomplished with studios tailored for developers and business analysts to create Web 2.0 mashups from almost any source, while reusing existing data and process information. Convertigo is radically changing how enterprises create applications, with the needed agility and reliability.

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