Akeneo: Empowering retailers with a single source of truth for product information

About Akeneo

Akeneo is a global leader in product experience management (PXM) helping businesses to unlock growth opportunities by delivering a consistent and compelling product experience. With its open PIM platform, add-ons, connectors, and marketplace, Akeneo PXM Studio dramatically improves product data quality and accuracy, simplifies catalog management, and accelerates the sharing of product information.

Industries: Technology
Location: France

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Akeneo uses Google Kubernetes Engine to power its SaaS Product Information Management platform, empowering retailers to take control of their inventory with an easy-to-use centralized platform.

Google Cloud results

  • Provides retail clients of all sizes with a powerful Product Information Management solution
  • Delivers peace of mind to customers everywhere with world-scale infrastructure and the highest levels of security compliance
  • Improves agility with infrastructure-as-code methodologies developed with Google Kubernetes Engine

Ships new releases weekly instead of every six months

“In retail you have two assets: the product and the customer,” says Benoit Jacquemont, CTO and co-founder at Akeneo. “Almost everyone has invested in a customer relationship management solution to keep track of their customers’ needs, but when it comes to product data, they often take a more ad hoc approach. We want to change that.”

Founded in 2013, Akeneo offers brands and retailers a comprehensive Product Information Management (PIM) solution that centralizes product data, making it much easier to enrich and update.

But before Akeneo was a company, it was an idea. The founders, Frederic de Gombert, Nicolas Dupont, and Benoit, had been consulting with a major French retail client, helping to get its online store into shape. They found that when it came to its product range, the client stored its data in offline spreadsheets with little coordination between departments. This resulted in lost information, duplicated work, and inefficiencies that were so bad they led to a six-month delay between what was available in store and what was available online.

“We migrated away from our on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud so that we could build a web-based service for our clients. We wanted them to stop worrying about hosting our software and focus on using it to add value to their business.”

Benoit Jacquemont, CTO and co-founder, Akeneo

The founders helped the client build a management system that centralized all the product information in one place, which helped collaboration between departments enormously and made running an ecommerce store much easier. Realising that other retailers were in the same situation, the founders worked on building a PIM for all kinds of clients, and Akeneo was born.

Word of Akeneo’s PIM spread quickly, and by 2014 the company served clients as far afield as the United States and Australia. At the end of 2016, the company adopted a bold new strategy to attract new clients and serve its existing ones better. Rather than offering its PIM as a traditional software, Akeneo wanted to turn it into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, available over the web. In order to make that a reality, the company needed a new technological foundation built with Google Cloud.

“We migrated away from our on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud so that we could build a web-based service for our clients,” says Benoit. “We wanted them to stop worrying about hosting our software and focus on using it to add value to their business.”

Evolving product information management with the cloud

The PIM may have existed before Akeneo, but it did so in a more rudimentary fashion. “The PIMs that were available when we started were really for enterprise-level users with large IT departments,” says Benoit. “A PIM was traditionally seen as an IT project. Our approach was to invest in a more streamlined UX and target non-technical users.”

Akeneo evolved the PIM into a customer-centric platform. The result was a simple-to-use, powerful open source PIM solution that could be used by anyone from all parts of the business.

The new PIM proved a hit with customers, but by 2016 the company was running into issues. While clients were very pleased with the product itself, they had to either host the Akeneo PIM themselves, or if they didn’t have the technical expertise, work with local partners to host it and get it running. If the company wanted to make its PIM available to everyone, it needed a new kind of offering, a web-based product that its customers could start using without any technical barriers.

"Google Kubernetes Engine has allowed us to really simplify our methods by taking an infrastructure-as-code approach. We have a really standardized way to deploy our software everywhere around the world. It's as easy to deploy in the US as in France, or in Germany, or in Australia."

Benoit Jacquemont, CTO and co-founder, Akeneo

The right foundation for retail

The existing on-premises infrastructure wasn’t built for that kind of product, so Akeneo had to look to the cloud. However, not just any cloud solution would do. With a global customer base, Akeneo needed to be able to provide the same high-quality service wherever their clients were. It also had to find a cloud provider that its retail customers wouldn’t see as a competitor. After evaluating the leading cloud platforms, Akeneo chose Google Cloud.

"It was the obvious choice for us for several reasons. Our retail clients felt at ease with Google, it has a global presence, and of all the options we looked at, Google Cloud was the clear winner in terms of performance and cost," says Benoit.

Akeneo began with a lift and shift of its existing infrastructure to Compute Engine virtual machines, forming a platform-as-a-service offering to clients. This approach minimized disruption while the company could explore its options with Google Cloud. Over the course of the next year, the company began developing its new web-based SaaS solution with a brand new infrastructure running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

"Google Kubernetes Engine has allowed us to really simplify our methods by taking an infrastructure-as-code approach," says Benoit. "We have a really standardized way to deploy our software everywhere around the world. It's as easy to deploy in the US as in France, or in Germany, or in Australia."

Pub/Sub provides a reliable and scalable messaging solution for the new microservices based architecture. Meanwhile, Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring give Akeneo's IT team enormous visibility into the infrastructure and the means to act quickly when things need changing.

Finally, Cloud Storage provides Akeneo with a safe high-performance online storage space for the millions of assets such as hi-res pictures that are associated with clients' product ranges.

"A major benefit is how much more agile we are now. With Google Cloud, we can change by increments and make our lives better week by week, instead of making big changes twice a year. And our customers benefit from a more mature product so it's a win-win for us."

Benoit Jacquemont, CTO and Co-founder, Akeneo

Increased sales, satisfied customers, excited developers

With its new SaaS solution powered by Google Cloud, Akeneo has gone from strength to strength. Today the company serves more than 500 enterprise clients, employing more than 230 people in offices across Europe, Australia, and North America. The SaaS product has been a big driver for this growth, accounting for 70% of new contracts. The company can now offer its clients a range of PIM solutions from the Growth Edition to the Enterprise Edition to the PXM Studio, which allows larger retailers to host their own platform. This extra revenue has helped to keep the Community Edition of the Akeneo PIM free and open source. The Community Edition is thriving with more than 80,000 downloads.

The close relationship Akeneo developed with Google Cloud has also meant that it can take advantage of co-marketing and co-selling opportunities, allowing prospective clients to learn more of the cloud technology behind the PIM. “When you walk into a room with representatives from Google Cloud, it shows you are a serious company,” says Benoit.

Along with the ease of use of a cloud-based system, customers can also be assured that their information is protected with the very highest levels of security. "Customers are obviously very sensitive about their product data, so the fact that Google Cloud provides ISO 27001 certification has really helped us,” says Benoit. “It removed a huge burden of security from our shoulders."

On its previous on-premises infrastructure, customer support was difficult for Akeneo. If the PIM software was hosted by local partners, then the company had to rely on them. If the software was hosted directly by the client, then support was a resource-intensive process. "If somebody had a problem, then we had to ask them a lot of questions and get screenshots just to diagnose what was wrong," says Benoit. "Now that we're on the cloud, we can help our customers much more quickly and easily."

Since moving to Google Cloud, Akeneo has dramatically sped up its release schedule. With on-premises infrastructure, Akeneo released updates every six months. With Google Cloud, the company releases every week.

"A major benefit is how much more agile we are now," explains Benoit. "With Google Cloud, we can change by increments and make our lives better week by week, instead of making big changes twice a year. And our customers benefit from a more mature product, so it's a win-win for us."

Developers didn’t just work faster, they worked with a completely different mindset. “With Google Kubernetes Engine, our developers evolved their approach to where they're not reliant on a cloud team like they were before," says Benoit. "They have more control over the whole life cycle of the product, and they're more excited. They feel they can do more with their products."

WIth the SaaS solution a success, Akeneo is hard at work looking for ways to improve its offering. The company is currently evaluating the feasibility of Google Cloud SQL for serverless database management and BigQuery to gain more insight into what its customers’ needs are. “There are a lot of services with Google Cloud that we can get more out of,“ says Benoit. “It really helps us to focus on bringing value to our customers.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Akeneo

Akeneo is a global leader in product experience management (PXM) helping businesses to unlock growth opportunities by delivering a consistent and compelling product experience. With its open PIM platform, add-ons, connectors, and marketplace, Akeneo PXM Studio dramatically improves product data quality and accuracy, simplifies catalog management, and accelerates the sharing of product information.

Industries: Technology
Location: France