10% cost reduction, with savings expected to reach millions of BRL in 2025
Enhanced data governance through table mapping
Higher visibility for business teams to make more assertive, data-driven decisions
After migrating its data to Google Cloud, the company leveraged several benefits, including platform stability, operational reviews, and data and file access transparency.
After migrating its data to Google Cloud, the company leveraged several benefits, including platform stability, operational reviews, and data and file access transparency.
Grupo Casas Bahia is present in the life of all Brazilians through the physical and online stores of the Casas Bahia and Pontofrio brands, the Extra.com.br online store, banQi’s financial solutions, Latin America’s top furniture manufacturer—Bartira—and CB FULL, a logtech company. As a result, the organization has consolidated its position as a fully connected platform for consumers.
By deploying strategies that go beyond retail and offering a customer-first journey, the company has focused on improving purchasing experiences with a wide array of options, including products, services, and financial and logistics solutions.
With thousands of employees, Grupo Casas Bahia has a strong presence across Brazil. Thanks to its robust, integrated logistics network, it connects +1,000 physical stores, dozens of distribution centers and delivery hubs servicing over 110 million customers. And to continue evolving and enhancing its solutions, technology is one of its top priorities.
Previously, Grupo Casas Bahia used another service provider to deal with large data volumes. However, the company faced several challenges, including high costs and limited storage capacity. Acknowledging Google Cloud’s leading technologies and cost optimization potential, the organization decided to embark on a new journey to unlock data-driven decisions and boost business growth.
Grupo Casas Bahia is always on the lookout for resources to increase operational productivity and efficiency through our platform. And Google Cloud with Gemini LLMs enables us to do just that, by significantly reducing costs and improving data quality by simplifying data access through governance and development for our product catalog.
Filipe Jaske
CTO, Grupo Casas Bahia
Data-driven value and strong business areas
It was October 2023 when the company began planning the migration. Thoughtworks was essential throughout, engaging over 20 professionals to build cloud foundations and to migrate +3,500 processes.
The migration took place throughout 2024 with all critical pipelines migrated by December. The company was able to start using Databricks, an open lakehouse platform that is fully integrated into Google Cloud’s data services, to consolidate Grupo Casas Bahia’s analytics applications.
Databricks leverages Google Kubernetes Engine, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Cloud Identity to deliver a scalable and secure experience. GKE makes the environment more resilient and supports successful containerized deployments of Databricks in the cloud.
Grupo Casas Bahia also began leveraging another cloud-based tool, Apache Airflow, as the main orchestration service to further support the tasks undertaken.
We decided to migrate our Databricks portion to Google Cloud. Throughout this journey, we expected to further embrace operational efficiency. That's why we worked hard on architecture planning, in other words what could best serve the business area. In short, everything to meet the necessary structural aspects.
Filipe Jaske
CTO, Grupo Casas Bahia
Higher data and cost control with encouraging projections for 2025
After migrating its data, Grupo Casas Bahia saw improvements in environment stability, legacy process assessments, cost reviews, and governance processes, thanks to the levels of data and file access transparency obtained.
This transformation process enabled the company to save costs by 10%, with savings expected to grow to millions of Brazilian reals in 2025.
When it comes to governance, the company benefited from mapping all tables in its data repository. This enabled enhanced visibility to control data and ultimately make more accurate decisions.
Overall data democratization became top of mind for Grupo Casas Bahia. The company intends to go deeper in this area, including topics such as access to data and the use of large language models (LLMs), and focusing also on increasing productivity.
Google Cloud will continue supporting the IT team, and it will also provide workshops to spread knowledge about how to effectively use tools. These initiatives will certainly improve autonomy and agility for professional teams at Grupo Casas Bahia.
As per the company’s data and infrastructure team, one of the most important benefits is that Google Cloud can be the path to leveraging both new and current tools, such as Gemini, Vertex AI and other artificial intelligence resources. Grupo Casas Bahia expects to obtain impactful, AI-driven analytics to meet its goals.
We’re now going to align our goals with the resources enabled by AI, especially in relation to data. Our aim is to use specialist as well as generalist agents, and Vertex AI could be the perfect solution to boost image, video, and description analytics.
Filipe Jaske
CTO, Grupo Casas Bahia
Grupo Casas Bahia is an omnichannel platform providing various consumer-facing retail solutions, including financial and logistics services and products. With countrywide operations, the company has already served over 100 million Brazilians under different brands.
Industry: Retail
Location: Brazil
Products: Apache Airflow, Cloud Identity, Databricks, Google Kubernetes Engine, IAM
About Google Cloud partner — Thoughtworks
Thoughtworks is a pioneering global technology consultancy that integrates the best of strategy, design and software engineering to provide companies with the foundation they need to thrive as modern digital businesses.
