Otto Group
Reimagines its Global Content Operations
The limits of a legacy platform
As one of the world’s largest online retailers, Otto Group operates on a scale few can imagine. With around 90 distinct retail brands and its flagship German site, Otto.de, generating over €12 billion in revenue, the demands on its digital infrastructure are immense. Every product story, across every brand, relies on a constant flow of high-quality media. But their existing technology, while stable, had become a source of operational drag, creating a bottleneck that couldn’t support the speed and volume the business required.
The challenge: friction at a global scale
Otto Group’s legacy media system was struggling under the weight of its own complexity. It wasn’t broken, but it lacked the agility and performance needed to power a world-class ecommerce experience for millions of customers. This created a state of constant friction within their content supply chain, where the effort required to manage content was disproportionate to the outcome.The key symptoms of this friction included:- Operational bottlenecks: The system’s tools for managing and maintaining assets were cumbersome for business users. Simple tasks became complex, slowing down workflows and making it difficult to keep pace with frequently changing campaign and product content.
- Compromised customer experience: The platform struggled with the efficient delivery of high-quality images at enterprise scale. In a business where visual commerce is everything, this inability to instantly serve the perfect image risked undermining the customer experience and diluting the power of their product stories.
- Inflexible architecture: The monolithic nature of the legacy system made change difficult and risky. The prospect of a complex and potentially disruptive migration process was a significant barrier to the innovation the business needed.
The solution: performance and partnership at scale
Otto’s market evaluation led them to seek a partner whose technology could offer superior capabilities and whose values aligned with their own agile, technology-driven culture. The solution centered on implementing the Amplience platform to address their core challenges of usability and performance head-on.
To resolve the operational bottlenecks, Content Hub provided a centralized and intuitive digital asset management (DAM) solution. This gave Otto’s business users the powerful and user-friendly functions they needed to streamline workflows and easily manage their vast library of assets. To tackle the customer experience challenge, Dynamic Media with Accelerated Media was implemented to serve as a faster, more reliable engine for asset delivery, ensuring every image was optimized and served instantly at enterprise scale.
This technological transformation was underpinned by a meticulously planned partnership. We worked with Otto to execute a seamless migration that leveraged their autonomous vertical architecture. By moving the platform over vertical by vertical, the entire project was completed on time and with zero disruption to any of their live production processes.
The results: speed, reliability, and a foundation for the future
Replacing their legacy system with the Amplience platform transformed Otto’s operational friction into a strategic advantage. The impact was immediate, providing Otto with the speed and reliability its global operations demand.
Faster page load times: By serving media in the latest, most efficient formats, Otto could significantly reduce page weight. This is a critical factor for improving SEO, lowering bounce rates, and increasing conversions in an ecommerce economy where every second matters.
Streamlined global workflows: Business users are now empowered with streamlined processes and easy-to-use tools, allowing them to manage a huge volume of assets and formats with greater speed and efficiency.
A true technology partnership: The success of the project went beyond technology. As Juergen Holtschmidt, Head of Technical Product Development Platform at Otto, confirmed: “With Amplience, we’ve found a partner who shares our values like working agile or being technology driven. And I hope that we can find some problems which we can solve together in future.“
Otto’s story proves that even at the largest scale, it’s possible to replace legacy friction with modern agility. By moving to a platform that could match their ambitions, they have built a foundation for the future, ensuring their content can move at the speed their business and customers demand. To see how Amplience can help you reimagine your content supply chain, book a demo today.
Hear directly from Otto Group
Watch the video to hear Juergen Holtschmidt, Head of Technical Product Development Platform Data, share his perspective on the migration, the power of a true technology partnership, and the results of transforming their global content operations.
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