Carrefour France achieves digital milestone

Leading global retailer Carrefour France has achieved a critical milestone in its ambitious goal to move 50% of its applications to the public cloud by 2022. Using Google Cloud VMware Engine, the retailer has successfully completed the migration of all VMware workloads in France to the Google Cloud Platform. As the Carrefour Group now focuses on achieving its recently announced 2026 digital retail strategy, operations outside of France will also leverage the VMware solution and locally established best practices as they too embark on the mandatory transition to Google Cloud.

By moving its VMware workloads from its on-premise data centers to the cloud, Carrefour France says it has reduced IT running costs by 30% (in TCO calculation) which it anticipates will reduce the price of products on supermarket shelves. It also claims it has decreased energy consumption by about 35%, enabling it to significantly reduce its carbon footprint. IT systems are more robust, the retailer is enjoying new levels of agility, faster time-to-market for new features and services, and it can more easily attract in-demand cloud native engineers as employees.

“Google Cloud VMware Engine has given Carrefour France a fast and simple route to the cloud. We were able to migrate on-premises VMware workloads to Google Cloud within minutes - it really is ‘lift and shift’. We’re excited to share this best practice with other countries as they execute our digital retail strategy 2026,” said Damien Cazenave, chief technology officer and chief information security officer, Carrefour France.

For 60 years, Carrefour Group has been a pioneer in the retail business, continuously striving to make its products both affordable and accessible to everyone. However, the company’s customer-centric approach was increasingly restricted by its vast, scattered and complex IT infrastructure - a mix of on-premise data centers, private and some public cloud. To simplify its IT landscape and regain control of its enterprise workloads, Carrefour France has taken a cloud-first approach, identified Google Cloud as its sole public cloud provider, and has started closing down most of its on-premise infrastructure.

Already running a large VMware based application landscape, Carrefour France naturally selected Google Cloud VMware Engine to move its enterprise workloads and data to Google Cloud. The migration was completed even faster than anticipated, with no disruption to employees or customers. VMware HCX, a key component of Google Cloud VMware Engine, ensured migrating the workloads from their on-premise environment to Google Cloud was quick and seamless, with little to no code modifications. Now Carrefour France’s IT team can manage their VMware software-defined data center running in the public cloud with familiar VMware tooling and without having to acquire new skills or train people on new tools.