Coca-Cola Amatil Improves its Customer Experience with IBM Cloud

Move to SoftLayer will significantly reduce IT costs and provide greater customer engagement

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Apr 07, 2015, 09:00 ET

SYDNEY, April 7, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it 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. Hosting the workloads in IBM's two SoftLayer cloud centers in Australia will provide CCA with a more agile environment to quickly respond to customer needs and will deliver significant annual savings to CCA.

Today's news 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 center.

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.

"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."

Over the next six months CCA will transition workloads to the IBM Cloud to run production, testing and development environments. These workloads span the organization and are 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," said IBM General Manger of Cloud Services James Comfort. "And with the opening of the second IBM Cloud center in Australia, organizations like CCA can now manage their data on-shore, with unmatched resiliency, security and scale."

About IBM Cloud
IBM is the global leader in open enterprise cloud enabling secure data and infrastructure integration in the cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

About Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA)
An ASX Top 50 listed company, CCA is one of Australia's largest premium branded beverage and food companies and one of the world's top five Coca-Cola bottlers with territories in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Samoa. CCA's diversified portfolio of products includes the iconic Coca-Cola brands, and Cascade adult soft drinks, Kirks soft drinks, Mount Franklin and Pump spring water, Powerade sports and Mother energy drinks, Goulburn Valley fruit juices, Nestea iced tea, Grinders coffee, tea and SPC Ardmona and Goulburn Valley packaged ready to eat fruit and vegetable products. CCA manufactures, sells and distributes a portfolio of premium alcohol beverages, including the Beam Global brands, as well as Molson Coors' Blue Moon and Coors beers, The Boston Beer Company's Samuel Adams and Rekorderlig Cider. The Australian Beer Company, CCA's joint venture with Casella, produces ARVO, Alehouse beers and Pressman's Australian Cider. CCA acquired the Fiji Brewery and distillery in Fiji and the Vailima Brewery in Samoa in 2012.