Wesfarmers OneDigital signs five-year deal with AWS

Wesfarmers’ digitally native business division, Wesfarmers OneDigital, has signed a new five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support its developing data and digital platform.

Under the agreement, AWS will become the strategic cloud provider across the Wesfarmers Group.

Wesfarmers OneDigital was established in July last year with the goal of providing a more seamless and personalised omnichannel experience across Wesfarmers’ retail businesses, including Bunnings Warehouse, Kmart, Officeworks and Target.

Wesfarmers sees about 1.5 million digital transactions and 210 million digital interactions across the group per month.

According to Wesfarmers OneDigital MD Nicole Sheffield, a key part of the new agreement is AWS’s support for the group’s OnePass membership program, which was built using AWS native services.

“We aim to grow this program to be an ‘essential household helper’, with customers using OnePass to receive free shipping across our retail brands on eligible purchases — with additional benefits for shopping in store and exclusive offers,” she said.

“The wide range of services from AWS allows us to quickly build and run modern applications without having to worry about managing infrastructure. This allows our team to remain focused on delivering great customer experiences rather than managing technology.”

The collaboration with AWS allowed Wesfarmers to launch OnePass in months instead of years, she said.

OneDigital runs Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka at the core of the platform, and is supported by AWS Fargate cluster, a serverless containerised environment within Amazon Elastic Container Service.

As part of the agreement, Wesfarmers will meanwhile be able to establish an AWS Skills Guild for each group division, with a goal of training 500 employees with AWS training and certification courses.

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