Retail has been on a roller coaster, thanks to a global pandemic, rising inflation, the prevalence of online shopping, and supply chain challenges. Competition is steep, too, with customers searching long and hard for the best price on a product.

To stand out in the retail industry, you need to elevate your business by being nimble. And you need to have the latest technology. 

That’s what The Home Depot decided to do when it purchased Austin-based startup, BlackLocus, approximately 12 years ago. The Home Depot, founded in 1978, is the world’s largest home improvement retailer with more than 2,300 stores in North America. 

BlackLocus, now a subsidiary of The Home Depot, drives market intelligence for the retail giant. Its work focuses on shaping the future of retail through data science, innovation, technology, and design. BlackLocus is a critical technology arm driving key product merchandising decisions for The Home Depot. 

However, when BlackLocus was purchased, it was using a different cloud provider than The Home Depot.  

“There were security and cost implications too,” says Justin Seides, a director at Slalom who worked on the cloud migration project. “The Home Depot saw an opportunity to streamline its solution and only pay for what it’s using.”

The Home Depot also saw an opportunity to further modernize, optimize, and standardize its infrastructure. The goal then became to move BlackLocus to Google Cloud. 

BlackLocus worked with Slalom technology consulting to move from its previous cloud infrastructure to Google Cloud. 

“The partnership with Slalom was strong,” says Troy Zhang, a software engineer and senior manager at The Home Depot. “I had years of experience working with the Slalom team, so I felt comfortable with them coming in and helping us out.” 

The project team was highly engaged with The Home Depot and BlackLocus—even from the earliest days. “The team provided the technical guidance that we were really hoping for,” adds Troy. 

Together, the team tackled over 40 projects, from data ingestion to matching and recommendation engines.

Slalom and BlackLocus decided to use Google Kubernetes Engine to keep the environments reliable and scalable, and used BigQuery, Vertex AI, cloud storage, and Cloud SQL Server as well. 

Vertex AI is now used as a component of the data science portion of the work to make recommendations to The Home Depot. 

And BigQuery improves the analytics and data science of the solution, helping the BlackLocus team garner insights and then use those for product recommendations. 

Slalom and BlackLocus worked hand in hand to stay focused on seamless integration and continuous improvement while updating projects in real time. The team was able to bridge communication gaps and identify dependencies as they worked. By building open communication channels and facilitating cross-team collaboration, Slalom helped empower BlackLocus to manage complexities with clarity and confidence.

For BlackLocus, development is easier and more streamlined today. There is less technical maintenance, so developers can spend their time making the most of their brain power, as opposed to just handling technical issues. 

BlackLocus is also a heavy utilizer of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Troy notes, “Whereas the team was previously running the machine learning models using Jupyter Notebook on their laptops, today the team is able to get on Vertex AI with Google Cloud.”  

And that helps developers deploy their AI models easier. 

BlackLocus’s transition to Google Cloud not only ensured seamless system continuity for The Home Depot but also unlocked significant cost savings. Being on an optimized infrastructure means The Home Depot will only pay for what it’s using today—eliminating additional spend on depreciated and unused technology. 

BlackLocus will no longer pay for two cloud services, adds Troy. “We had to have a separate budget for each of the cloud services before; there’s always a little overhead if you’re paying two cloud providers.” 

Today’s rate for cloud services? Troy says it’s definitely lower than the previous rates. 

BlackLocus enables The Home Depot to stay at the leading edge of pricing capabilities, and at the top of its game in the home improvement industry. 

What does all this BlackLocus work mean for The Home Depot? The retail giant moves forward with ongoing innovations in data science driven retail recommendations to continue its stride toward success and growth in the home improvement industry.