Cellenza supports L’Oréal Beauty Tech

L’Oréal’s Beauty Tech is reinventing the beauty of the future through science and new technologies.

Emmanuel Champommier has been a Solution Architect for the group since 2015, where he works in both the Research & Innovation functional areas and supports the HR and Corporate areas. He is also involved in technology areas such as the cloud and integration. He was particularly interested in IoT-related issues and called on Cellenza within the framework of L’Oréal’s Connected Beauty Platform.

How did you hear about Cellenza?

I used to work for one of Cellenza’s clients in the insurance industry. I had the opportunity to meet Cellenza experts on several occasions without working directly with them. It was actually at L’Oréal, working on our connected beauty platform, that we started working together.

What problems did you turn to Cellenza to solve?

After an internal evaluation of the platform, we needed to make sure it met two requirements. Firstly, that it was in line with our architectural principles, and secondly, because the platform was closely tied to a cloud service provider, it was strategic for us to be autonomous and able to switch between CSPs. So, we had to make sure that the platform was not tied to a specific cloud service provider. We asked Cellenza to conduct both a theoretical and an operational study, complete with concrete implementations, to help us complete this project and address these two challenges.

“Cellenza offered us innovative, out-of-the-box solutions, while respecting our functional requirements.”

Emmanuel Champommier, Solution Architect, Beauty Tech L’Oréal

What challenges and problems did you encounter with containerization?

L’Oréal now uses the Cloud as a standard architecture. Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and native cloud architectures allow us to meet today’s business challenges.

Based on the established architecture governance (design authority bodies, strategic principles, publication of operational boosters, etc.) that allows us to manage and monitor the application portfolio, the use of containers (and their orchestration) is therefore systematically considered, especially with the use of container as a service (CaaS) services and the resulting technical (architecture, development, security, operations) and organizational implications.

The applications delivered by L’Oréal IT thus become more elastic and resilient to better meet the needs of our businesses and their ongoing evolution in an ever-changing environment.

We were primarily concerned with ensuring the independence of the platform from the CSP. Containerization is an effective way to limit that dependence, even if the containers themselves need to run individually in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), PaaS services (Azure Container Instance, Google Cloud Run, AWS Fargate, etc.), or the orchestration layer.

One of the benefits of Kubernetes is that it adds an extra layer and a new level of virtualization to the cloud provider, allowing us to orchestrate our containers while addressing the challenges of scaling our connected objects (like Lancôme’s Skin Screen or Yves Saint Laurent’s Perso).

You can run your K8s platform yourself or even use PaaS services (such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, etc.). Ultimately, we had to strike the right balance between agility, scalability, and low CSP dependence.

How did Cellenza become involved in the project?

Cellenza was involved in designing and building the platform that now includes a growing number of use cases and connected objects. The challenges of the Beauty Tech industry are reflected in this platform, and it was important to us for it to respect our architectural principles. Cellenza was an important partner in carrying out the architectural alignment study and proposing solutions tailored to our technical and business requirements. We had discussions at an extremely high technical level. Cellenza provided theoretical elements, such as market research and vendor monitoring, to propose innovative solutions that met our needs.

However, Cellenza’s consultants went far beyond a basic theoretical study and included practical implementation components that supported the study’s findings with concrete experiments. This mission allowed us to put into practice the principles envisioned, develop new expertise, and identify several implementation scenarios classified according to various criteria important to the teams in charge of the platform (complexity of implementation, time to market, cost, security, etc.).

What were the results?

There are three primary ones: validation of our technical hypotheses to ensure independence from the cloud provider, implementation of a platform evolution strategy, and identification of technical opportunities to watch out for.

The study’s results shed light on what could be done to align the platform with our architectural principles. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and Cellenza suggested several scenarios, each considering 6 to 8 factors. Cellenza’s consultants also came up with some innovative aspects, such as using Dapr, which was suggested to us. Regardless of whether we adopt these technologies in the future, considering them allowed us to look beyond our current solutions.

Did the project lead to changes in your strategy or organization?

First and foremost, the project helped us create a vision. Organizationally, it allowed us to involve other teams in new challenges. We were able to bring the infrastructure teams on board and position them to play a role in the migration to cloud-native architectures. This is a big change because moving to these enterprise-wide architectural patterns will require us to work more closely with the development and operations teams. It really is a new approach.

How did the collaboration with Cellenza go?

Cellenza’s consultants fully understood our functional and technical challenges. We collaborated closely with them, holding high-level discussions and clear, transparent communication. Cellenza’s expertise went beyond a simple study, proposing real-world technologies, infrastructures, and even implementations in test & learn mode to test the proposed scenarios. It was a highly constructive collaboration on all levels.

Why is Cellenza the right partner for you to work with?

Both for its expertise and innovation. Cellenza’s consultants understood both our business and technical difficulties. Their expertise allows them to look at the architecture from a high level while also being able to run it, dig into the solutions, and make out-of-the-box suggestions. We were even surprised at times – but that’s what innovation is all about!