Casino teams with Google and Accenture

Retail company Casino Group has announced a tie-up with Google Cloud and Accenture to support its digital transformation.

Casino, which reported an 8% decline in 2020 sales to €31.9bn, will work with the two vendors to modernize its business-to-consumer retail activities, drawing on Google Cloud’s smart analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to drive the customer experience.

The other major focus area will be Casino’s business-to-business activities which covers areas such as its retail media properties and accelerate the development of the RelevanC data marketing software division, which it backed as a start-up in 2017 and bought outright one year later. RelevanC offers mining and analytics services based on both consumers’ actual in-store purchases and their online behaviour.

PAC’s View: This is an interesting tie-up for several reasons.

It is another example of how dynamic the French retail sector has become for software and IT services investment. Carrefour recently announced a string of new initiatives under its €2.8bn, five-year “Project 2022” retransformation programme, and its Belgium wing also announced a deal with Google Cloud to support the re-platforming of its core SAP system.

France is one of Google Cloud’s most successful markets, with a run of wins that includes Orange, Renault and luxury goods manufacturer LVMH. The company plans to open a new “region” in France in the next 12 months or so, under the leadership of former VMWare executive Anthony Cirot, who took the reins of Google Cloud France in May.

And with this latest deal, Accenture continues to underline its standing as Google Cloud’s leading partner in Europe, notably in France, where its team is built around the 2019 acquisition of 100-strong Google specialist Cirruseo.