IBM has signed a multimillion-dollar agreement with Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) to move its Asia Pacific customer planning and relationship management systems to the IBM Cloud. Hosting the workloads in IBM’s two SoftLayer cloud centres in Australia is said to provide CCA with a more agile environment to quickly respond to customer needs and to deliver significant annual savings to CCA.
This agreement builds on the five-year multi-million dollar cloud agreement that CCA signed with IBM last year to manage its mission-critical SAP infrastructure in IBM’s Sydney cloud centre.
Demand for CCA’s beverage goods is seasonal, impacted daily by several factors including when the weather is hot or when major events are taking place. These fluctuations make it costly for CCA to own and manage its own IT infrastructure. To continue to support these workloads in-house CCA would need to make capital infrastructure investments designed for the highest potential demand.
The IBM Cloud provides the flexibility for CCA to provision capacity to match customer demand, in a secure and reliable environment. It also allows CCA to spin up new development environments to deliver new products and services for customers through an online portal quickly and cost-effectively.
“Our business requires the highest levels of Customer Service 24/7. We must have our products on shelves at any hour of the day or night that our consumers wish to purchase them. We have large transaction volumes which vary significantly depending on factors like location, day, season and what’s on,” said Barry Simpson, group CIO at Coca-Cola Amatil. “The move to SoftLayer provides us with a game-changing level of flexibility, resiliency and reliability essential to service our customer needs. This consumption based model also removes the need for large expenditure on IT infrastructure,” added Barry Simpson.
Over the next six months CCA will transition workloads to the IBM Cloud to run production, testing and development environments. These workloads span the organisation and are essential for CCA’s customer relations management, planning, forecasting and reporting. The workloads are used daily by CCA sales, operations and finance, along with their partners and customers.
“With CCA extending its relationship with IBM, they will be able to more quickly respond to changing market dynamics,” said Jennifer Moxon, IBM Cloud general manager Australia and New Zealand. “And with the opening of the second IBM Cloud centre in Australia, organisations like CCA can now manage their data on-shore, with unmatched resiliency, security and scale.”
