Global technology and innovation company IBM has signed a multi-million dollar agreement with Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) to move its Asia Pacific customer planning and relationship management systems to the IBM Cloud.
IBM is the global leader in open enterprise cloud enabling secure data and infrastructure integration in the cloud. The company said in a press release that by hosting CCA’s workloads in its two SoftLayer cloud centres in Australia, the beverage company will gain a more agile environment to quickly respond to customer needs and achieve significant annual savings.
The agreement, which was signed on Tuesday, 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 and highly impacted by many factors, including the weather conditions or if there are major events taking place. These variables make it expensive for CCA to own and manage its own IT infrastructure, as it would need to make capital infrastructure investments designed for the highest potential demand to continue to support these workloads in-house.
The agreement with IBM Cloud provides the company with the flexibility to provision capacity to match customer demand, in a secure and reliable environment.
“As we continue our transition to cloud we are backed by IBM, a partner we work with and trust. 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.”
The next six months will see CCA transition its workloads to the IBM Cloud to run production, testing and development environments. IBM General Manger of Cloud Services James Comfort said those workloads were essential for CCA’s customer relations management, planning, forecasting and reporting.
“With CCA extending its relationship with IBM, they will be able to more quickly respond to changing market dynamics,” Mr Comfort said.
“And with the opening of the second IBM Cloud centre in Australia, organizations like CCA can now manage their data on-shore, with unmatched resiliency, security and scale.”
