Seres: Could you introduce Nestlé France to us?
D. Jaillard - Nestlé in France covers the following businesses: Nestlé France, Nestlé Waters France, Nestlé Purina Petfoods and Accessories, Nutrition, Nespresso France and Cereals Partners France. For Nestlé Group, France is the top market in Europe and second largest worldwide. A few key figures: 5,081 million euros turnover in 2007; 16,000 employees; 30 production sites; 5 research sites.

Seres: When and how did your project to implement an AS2 solution arise?
D. Jaillard - The project was first started in February 2008. It was part of the migration of all of our EDI applications for all businesses onto our centralised platform in Germany. We devised several stages. The first of these stages was to transfer the EDI application for the Nestlé Purina Petfoods and Accessories businesses. We therefore needed to find a service provider which would communicate in AS2 with our platform and which would provide a link with our non-AS2 customers, for whom it meant continuing to send and receive their messages without making any changes to their own configuration.

Seres: How was implementation of your project organised?
D. Jaillard – For this first stage, the main implementation phases were as follows:

• Define the specification,
• Establish and test the AS2 connection between Seres and our centralised platform in Germany,
• Compile a list of customers whose messages would pass through the AS2 gateway along with the data needed for configuration,
• Prepare to migrate the Allegro Purina mailbox hosted at a service provider onto the Seres platform,
• Initialise and configure the AS2 gateway and Allegro mailbox on the Seres platform,
• Test the interchange of messages between customer systems and our platform in Germany,
• Implement live.

Seres: What results have you been able to see so far?
D. Jaillard – Live running started on the scheduled date (July 2008) with no impact on our business. We have not seen any problems since, but we have seen improved reliability and performance compared with our previous solution.

Seres: Why was Seres chosen as the service provider? What are the benefits of Seres’ solution compared with other solutions on the market?
D. Jaillard – Seres was chosen because it met the criterion of being a solution that could be put in place quickly given our timescales, Seres being the owner of Allegro which made dealing with the legacy system easier.