Cloud case studies
Enabling sustainable commerce through cloud modernization
Adevinta goes all-in on its cloud-native journey
When Adevinta acquired eBay Classifieds Group in 2021, which doubled the size of the business overnight, Adevinta enlisted our help to navigate this complex technical landscape by supporting them through their end-to-end cloud modernization journey.
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.
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 and infrastructure that its marketplaces operated on—and a range of different operating models in how it developed and brought its products to market.
"Adevinta’s purchase of eBay Classifieds Group in 2021 doubled the size of the business overnight. Alongside that, however, it was faced with a complex environment across the cloud and infrastructure that its marketplaces operated on."
Deloitte and Adevinta: Pioneering cloud modernization in the sustainable commerce landscape
What happened next
Adevinta 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, with Adevinta’s digital platforms being primarily B2C and C2C, the ability to build great products, innovate, tailor user experiences, and react to feedback is completely fundamental to what it does.
Adevinta quickly realized that it needed to develop a cloud and infrastructure strategy to accommodate 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 an end-to-end transformation to the way Adevinta builds products and the way it 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, Adevinta is now a significant way through a cloud transformation to optimize the way it works, adapting to its new scale, and delivering a world-class developer experience for its 2,000+ engineers.
Along the way, this has included detailed discovery and migration of more than 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.
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 is well advanced in its technical migrations but also continues to transform the way it builds its product as a truly cloud-native organization.
“The Deloitte team has 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. The team initially brought the analytical power behind the business case and expertise to approach and 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, so we also brought in change management capabilities.
Deloitte provided the flexible engineering scale and cloud expertise across Europe that we needed to accelerate our team’s 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 2,000+ engineers and the whole company!”
— Renaud Bruyeron, VP of Cloud and Infrastructure at Adevinta
