Tesco is to speed up the process of launching online shopping in new markets after signing a deal to adopt a standard IT solution throughout its business.

The world’s third largest retailer has adopted Nolio ASAP as its standard solution for application release automation across Tesco.com.

The product will be used across Tesco’s data centres and will allow a uniformity in all of its online shopping platforms.

It means the grocer can use the same deployment process to deploy to multiple countries even if there are differences in the applications and configuration for each country. It can also easily update the software uniformly.

The move brings “increased business agility, reduced costs and a competitive edge”, IT supplier Nolio said.

Tesco.com head of release deployment and software configuration management Vipul Shah said: “Nolio allows us to greatly speed-up our roll-out processes and ensure higher quality of releases. The product’s ease of use is hugely beneficial to us in terms of maintainability and reducing overhead.

“Our core strategy for this decade is to ‘Go Faster’ and we always strive to become better, simpler, and cheaper. Nolio ASAP fits in well with this ethos and ensures we have the right mechanism in place to deliver exciting new offerings to our customers.”

Nolio vice-president for products Eran Sher said: “The ability to drive rapid IT change and maintain the integrity of a SaaS application, while minimising human errors is finally here. Although a relatively new concept, Manifest Deployment builds on the well-tried principle of keeping data and process separate.

“The benefits for large IT users, when faced with wholesale IT changes, are huge and we are delighted that Tesco chose Nolio as the correct technology for this major IT shift.”