Richemont moves entire enterprise IT infrastructure to Amazon's AWS

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Nov 23, 2021

Richemont’s luxury offerings may be a world away from the value focus of Amazon’s retail sites, but the two companies have found common ground with news on Tuesday that the former is moving its entire enterprise IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It should mean more dynamic e-tail experiences, more personalisation, video chat and other benefits at the firm that owns Chloé, Dunhill and Cartier.

But it’s not just about customer-facing parts of the business. The company will be using a wide range of “advanced cloud capabilities” that should feed through to a better business overall. These include machine learning, analytics, security, and database capabilities, “to foster product innovation across its physical retail operations and e-commerce offerings”.

As a result, Richemont will close its European data centres and migrate additional data centres in Hong Kong and the US to AWS by the end of next year. 

As part of its digital transformation strategy, the company will move more than 5,000 virtual machines and other resources to AWS to “modernise its infrastructure, raise its security posture, and drive automation across its global operations”.

There’s a lot of change going on at Richemont at present across the massive luxury business and this is a wider part of that process, even though consumers shouldn’t notice notice any obvious differences, beyond overall improvements.

Improvements should be seen as Richemont will now use AWS cloud-based systems that provide “engaging customer experiences via digitally optimised channels that use machine learning”. 

As mentioned, it’s also aiming to add “dynamic digital experiences for its e-commerce platform faster, including personalised storefronts and styling services, video chat consultations featuring fashion shows customised to the shopper’s tastes, and tailored offers for early access to new items before they hit stores”.

It’s a huge deal for both firms and Richemont’s “cloud-first strategy” includes migrating a massive number of operations to AWS as well as e-commerce systems. Its business-critical enterprise IT applications and enterprise resource planning will be migrated, along with accounting, supply chain management, manufacturing, and product lifecycle management.