Coca-Cola Amatil looks to the cloud

Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA), one of the world’s top five Coca-Cola bottlers, has a diverse portfolio of products. One of the most challenging aspects of CCA’s business is the seasonal demand for its beverages, which is impacted daily by factors as diverse as unseasonally warm weather or the staging of major sporting and cultural events.

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 decision has therefore been taken to move CCA’s Asia Pacific customer planning and relationship management systems to the IBM Cloud. Hosting the workloads in IBM’s two SoftLayer cloud centres in Australia will provide CCA with a more agile environment to quickly respond to customer needs and will deliver significant annual savings to CCA.

“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 CCA. “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,” he added.

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.

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.