Enabling sustainable commerce through Cloud First Modernisation
Adevinta goes all-in on its Cloud Native journey
When Adevinta made an acquisition that doubled the size of its business overnight, they enlisted our help to navigate this complex technical landscape by supporting them through their end-to-end Cloud First Modernisation.
The Client
Adevinta is a leading online classifieds group and champion for sustainable commerce across Europe and beyond. With more than 25 digital marketplaces across 10 countries, its portfolio spans consumer goods, mobility, real estate, holiday rentals and jobs. Together, its marketplaces attract more than 120 million users every month and over a million businesses.
Its mission is to create perfect matches through our locally loved, internationally connected marketplaces. Its international team of diverse individuals are united in their purpose to make a positive impact on the environment, the economy and society every single day.
The Challenge
Adevinta’s purchase of eBay Classifieds Group in 2020 doubled the size of the business overnight. When the deal ultimately closed in June 2021, it placed significant focus on integrating the two businesses by safely exiting the transitional arrangements with eBay. Alongside that however, it was faced with a complex environment across the cloud & infrastructure that its marketplaces operated on – and a range of different operating models in how we developed and brought its products to market: it had half of the business that was already fully in the cloud and very advanced in its application of cloud principles, and the other half still running on premise - resulting in a complex, inconsistent and overall inefficient landscape. And of course Adevinta is a B2C, C2C online business - so the ability to build great products, innovate, tailor user experiences and react to feedback is completely fundamental to what it does.
The Solution
Adevinta quickly realised that it needed to develop a cloud & infrastructure strategy to exploit its new scale, accelerate how it brings products to market and leverage the wave of innovation that Cloud offered. The public cloud for Adevinta is a strategic move. It’s not about technical migrations, it's not about moving servers to Cloud. It is a full end to end transformation to the way it build products, the way its brings them to market. Adevinta decided to move the whole portfolio of brands to a single cloud provider and to unify and standardize the developer experience on top of a single cloud provider.
Together with Deloitte and AWS, Adevinta is now a significant way through a Cloud Transformation to optimise the way it works, exploit its new scale and deliver a world-class developer experience for its 2,000+ engineers.
Along the way this has included detailed discovery and migration of over 3,000 custom-built software services, design and implementation of a new operating model – and critically – the execution of a change management plan to take its teams across Europe through this huge change.
“So the Deloitte team have been extremely customer focused, right from the start of our work together on Adevinta's cloud strategy. They helped steer the strategy process, navigate the stakeholder environment, and then drive the case home with Adevinta's executive team and Board of directors.
They assembled a team that brought the complete range of Deloitte expertise. In the beginning this team brought the analytical power behind the business case and expertise to approach & prepare the complex negotiation process with the Cloud vendors.
As we progressed, we also knew that the transformation needed to be deeply rooted in our people, it’s not just a technical migration - so we brought in change management capabilities to help engage the drumbeat of the programme.
Deloitte provided the flexible engineering scale and AWS expertise across Europe that we needed to accelerate our teams migration.
A highlight for me was how the Deloitte team adapted its playbook to Adevinta - not only in terms of the technical work, but also in terms of the approach to program management that would fit Adevinta’s tech culture and distributed governance. This was very impressive, very customer focused, and a key success factor in the delivery of a program impacting 2000 engineers and the whole company!"
Renaud Bruyeron, VP of Cloud & Infrastructure at Adevinta
“Adevinta has repeatedly shown an ability to be bold and forward looking. When it came to Cloud, it was clear that it needed a strategy to respond to a continually changing environment whilst delivering post deal synergies. We’ve had the pleasure of working very closely with Adevinta over the past 3 years starting with the Cloud strategy & business case in 2021 - and following detailed discovery, we’ve supported Adevinta’s end-to-end Cloud-First Modernisation. This has involved bringing together a multi-disciplinary team covering advisory, engineering, delivery and change management from across Europe and our Global Delivery Network.”
Adam Gogarty, Chief Strategist, UK Cloud & Engineering at Deloitte
Looking to the future
Of course becoming cloud-native is only a means to an end. Ultimately, Adevinta seeks to accelerate its product delivery to meet the evolving needs of its customers: it is a product game, and the cloud is an enabler in this game.
Adevinta are well advanced in its technical migrations, but it continues to transform the way it builds its product as a truly cloud native organisation.
