"For us, the goal is to create a delightful experience for our customers," says Stijn. "To do that, we have to digitize and enable integration across channels and with our partners."

For Stijn and Carrefour Belgium Chief Information Officer (CIO) Olivier Luxon, the most realistic solution was an interim environment that could help them take the next steps towards IT modernization. They needed a mature and secure cloud data center where they could quickly lift-and-shift core workloads for immediate scalability. Then, they could strategically re-platform machines to Google Cloud Platform.

In Olivier's mind, they only had two options: build the interim environment themselves or find a trusted partner to take on the challenge.

"We could redo everything ourselves, but that's not our business," said Oliver. "We aren't data center guys. We have other things to do for our customers."

Turning to Kyndryl was an easy choice, according to Stijn.

"Kyndryl had been serving us for several years. They had all the experience with our systems... We were happy. And why change a winning team, right?"

Together, Stijn, Olivier and the Kyndryl team mapped out a plan to migrate core systems to the Kyndryl Tier 3+ Hybrid Cloud Data Center in southern Belgium. They completed the work in record time, migrating 100% of on-premises systems without downtime or disruptions to business operations.

In parallel, the team identified an opportunity to help modernize store operations by efficiently moving store systems and their legacy applications to Google Cloud Platform. The existing environment was distributed, with many stores running applications on outdated PCs kept in storage or wet rooms.

"We basically had one small data center per store," said Olivier. "We wanted more flexibility and ease of building a new infrastructure for the store. The only way to do that was to define a clear, standard catalog with different services, feeds and platforms."

Kyndryl used Red Hat Ansible to build and operate an IT service catalog on Google Cloud Platform that enabled store franchise owners to remotely provision virtual machines (VMs). With the same VMs running across the stores, Carrefour Belgium enabled their front-end and back-end systems to more consistently and efficiently integrate in executing current business operations and set up a reliable framework to modernize the applications that most directly affect Carrefour customers. By uniformly managing inventory and accounts, for example, Carrefour can deliver the same experience at any store a customer visits.

"The whole orchestration around it — creating that infrastructure based on code scripts — pressing the button and having the store online is essential to our operations," Stijn said.

"By moving the store compute environment to a central environment, we're able to react on the spot. To tackle issues quickly," he continues. "We also have the elasticity and flexibility that a cloud environment brings, allowing us to onboard new services for our customers - creating more delightful experiences."