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Overview

At Arco, we joined a major transformation effort centred on a legacy commerce platform built around SAP, with a Hybris front end that had become increasingly clunky, slow to evolve, and difficult to maintain.

The challenge was not simply technical. Arco operates in a nuanced space that blends B2B and B2C retail journeys, with important relationships between the business, its partners, and its end customers. Any modernisation had to respect those realities while creating a platform that was easier to scale, easier to change, and far better suited to long-term growth.

The challenge

The existing estate had all the familiar problems of a large monolithic commerce platform:

• slow and costly change
• heavy dependence on specialist platform knowledge
• tight coupling between core capabilities
• limited flexibility when introducing new features
• risk attached to almost every release

For an online commerce business, this kind of bottleneck has a direct commercial impact. The platform needed to improve, but the business could not tolerate disruption. Uptime and continuity were critical throughout the transition.

Our approach

Applying the Port60 method, we worked to structurally strangle the legacy platform rather than pursue a risky big-bang rewrite.

That meant first developing a deep understanding of the domain, especially the way Arco’s customer and partner models influenced the overall retail experience. From there, we were able to identify where service boundaries could be introduced, where legacy dependencies could be reduced, and how to reshape the platform incrementally.

The target architecture moved toward Spring Boot microservices running on Azure, giving Arco a more modular and resilient foundation while allowing change to be delivered in stages.

Delivery in motion

This transformation required careful planning and disciplined iteration. We had to move quickly, but every step also had to be safe.

By understanding the data, the flows, and the operational pressures of the existing estate, we were able to work through phased delivery cycles that introduced value progressively rather than asking the business to absorb unnecessary risk all at once.

The programme maintained an extremely high level of service continuity throughout, with uptime expectations around 99.999%, which was essential for a business so heavily dependent on online commerce.

The outcome

The shift toward Azure and Spring Boot created a platform direction that was more modern, scalable, and easier to manage.

It reduced the long-term burden of running and maintaining heavyweight on-premise infrastructure, while also opening the estate up to a far broader Java engineering skill set. That matters commercially as much as technically: relying less on scarce, expensive specialist platform expertise gives the business more flexibility in how it grows and supports the platform in future.

Just as importantly, Arco was no longer constrained by the same monolithic model. The organisation gained a more practical route to ongoing evolution, with an architecture better aligned to modern delivery.

Why this mattered

For Arco, this was not only a technology refresh. It was a strategic move away from a hard-to-change commerce estate toward a platform capable of supporting the pace, reliability, and scalability the business needed.

The result was a stronger foundation for online retail, delivered in a way that respected both the complexity of the domain and the commercial reality that downtime was not an option.