Google Cloud supplants Azure as Unilever cloud of choice

Multinational consumer goods giant Unilever has signed a five-year contract with Google Cloud that will see the hyperscaler become the leading supplier of cloud infrastructure for the company’s data platforms. 

The new deal with Google – which will see deployment of the cloud provider’s Vertex AI – will add to existing Google cloud provision at the company and supplant a Microsoft Azure deployment, which was described as providing “the bulk of its off-premise estate” when the partnership was announced in 2023.

Unilever will continue to use Microsoft workplace productivity tools such as M365 and Copilot, but according to a Google spokesperson, “Google Cloud will become the destination for Unilever’s consolidated cloud and data platform”.

According to Google’s Alex Rutter, EMEA managing director for artificial intelligence (AI), the collaboration will focus on transitioning key enterprise applications and data to Google Cloud, and building on the use of AI to enhance marketing functionality, in particular in customer-facing applications and using agentic AI. 

Rutter said: “The deployment will include building next-generation capabilities for future ‘agentic commerce’, where the consumer’s shopping journey is increasingly shaped by AI. This includes enhancing Unilever’s brand discovery, marketing measurement and creating AI-augmented marketing strategies.”

Rutter said it would also include “migrating Unilever’s enterprise applications and data platforms to Google Cloud to create a unified, AI-first digital backbone. This will enable the company to act with greater agility and turn data into actionable insights more quickly.”

He added that the plan is to deploy “advanced AI across Unilever’s entire value chain” and that “Google Cloud will become the destination for Unilever’s consolidated cloud and data platform, serving as the backbone for its AI-driven transformation”.

The emphasis seems to be on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-like AI, using Unilever’s own data to generate insights that are relevant and actionable to its business processes. 

In 2023, Unilever, with help from Accenture, transitioned the company to a cloud-only operation, with – it was reported at the time – the bulk of its cloud estate being run on Microsoft Azure. 

The move was seen as something of a landmark project at the time. Unilever is a €50bn turnover company with 125,000 employees worldwide, 400 brands and a sales presence in 190 countries. 

Going all-in on cloud was seen as a significant move, and one that potentially enhanced access to flexible and scalable infrastructure, but also made operations more sustainable. 

At the time, Microsoft executives described their deployment as providing “the ‘foundation’ of the company’s cloud estate”. Now, as described above, Google says it will “serve as the backbone for [Unilever’s] AI-driven transformation”.

It is possible the two hyperscalers will sit side-by-side to provide cloud services in different areas of Unilever operations. The likelihood is, for example, that the deployment begun in 2023 focused more on back-end factory and warehousing, while the new Google-provisioned projects will be more customer-facing.

It’s quite normal for enterprises to use multiple cloud providers, and that can often be based on functional segmentation within the business, said Lydia Leong, distinguished vice-president analyst at Gartner.

“Gartner survey data indicates that approximately 80% of mid-size and enterprise organisations use multiple public cloud providers for infrastructure and platform as a service. That number has remained essentially unchanged over the last five years,” she said. 

Leong added: “Organisations typically segment provider choice based on geography, business units, use cases and technology stacks – highlighting the ways that the providers are differentiated from one another, and not interchangeable commodities.”

Having said that, Gartner has also noted that multicloud strategies can increase complexity, demand greater skills, cost more – including because of reduced bulk and therefore discounts – and if not planned well can lead to chaotic outcomes.