Big Red Group teams up with Cognizant

Australian experience company Big Red Group is partnering global IT services company, Cognizant to transform its digital platforms. 

The group is home to brands such as Adrenaline, Experience Oz, Experience Oz Local Agent, Lime&Tonic, and RedBalloon.

Cognizant will now lead Big Red Group’s digital transformation and deliver a new technology stack targeted towards conversion uplift, improving the customer and supplier end-to-end experience, and providing a scalable platform for growth.

It’s predicted the company’s transformation will break down silos throughout its various businesses, leading to a more streamlined operation.

The digital transformation process will also include the redesign of consumer marketplaces including RedBalloon, Adrenaline and ExperienceOz, and enable transactions for activity and experience suppliers.

CTO steps down

The engagement of Cognizant fits into a broader five-year digital transformation project that was being led by chief technology officer Brent Rutherford, who was appointed to the role around seven months ago.

Speaking to iTnews at the time, Rutherford said the company was “undergoing a digital transformation of [its] ecommerce experience for suppliers and consumers across the suite of brands”, which will “unlock organisational efficiencies and support the features required for the next phase of growth”.

He added he would be “focused on creating the technology environment” and optimising technology usage technology across every aspect of the business "into one cloud-native multi-brand ecommerce platform."

He recently wrote on LinkedIn Rutherford that Big Red Group’s “technology sail is set and they are on a good heading”, adding it was “time for new horizons”.

“With my stint as CTO ... drawing to an end this month, I've been reminiscing about the last six months and the incredible volume of learning that was packed into the period,” Rutherford said.

He added the experiences industry holds “technical complexity” with “low levels of digitisation”.

“The final fully cloud-native design is a thing of beauty, and leverages the best of AWS, Salesforce, and a range of best-in-class martech... with a core custom microservices engine leveraging the decades of experience in the company to handle those tricky industry-specific problems,” he wrote.

Big Red Group told iTnews Rutherford has been valuable part of its digital transformation and “it is bittersweet to have him go.”

“However, we are very excited to continue building the momentum with our recently appointed long term transformation partner Cognizant," a spokesperson said.

“We’re continuing with our digital transformation efforts – including the updating of our tech stacks and defragmentation of API [and] integration standards.”