Coca-Cola & IBM / Red Hat Partner for Digital Transformation
Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler based on revenue, has signed a multiyear agreement with IBM to accelerate its transformation to an open hybrid cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
In a statement, CCEP says that the move is designed to reduce operational expenses, increase IT resiliency and leverage analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its daily operations, so as to bring enhanced business insights and deliver greater service to its millions of customers.
A key priority for CCEP is to streamline its existing IT infrastructure to create a platform for standardised business processes, data, and technology, creating a springboard from which it can leverage data analytics, IoT and AI technologies to provide new insights across its operations, to help drive further efficiencies.
As per the agreement, IBM – utilising its deep industry expertise – will help CCEP transform to an IBM hybrid cloud environment, managed by IBM. This will include the use of the IBM public cloud, and several large SAP workloads. The agreement will also see CCEP provided with a consolidated view and a single point of control over its entire IT infrastructure, the statement adds.
"Our successful collaboration with IBM over the last few years has given us the confidence to take the next step in our strategic cloud-first digital transformation. The selection of IBM's hybrid cloud architecture with Red Hat OpenShift gives us the flexibility to optimize across different public cloud platforms according to our future needs,” says Peter Brickley, Chief Information Officer of Coca-Cola European Partners.
IBM will help CCEP to modernise its IT environment by using Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide an open standard, cost-effective platform, the statement said. A cornerstone of this transition will be Red Hat OpenShift, a comprehensive Kubernetes platform, which will allow CCEP to build mission critical applications once and run them on the IBM public cloud. Furthermore, IBM’s Multicloud management capabilities will be used to all legacy systems, private and public clouds, to be integrated and managed from a single dashboard.
"As businesses shift to cloud, we understand that each industry and client has unique business needs in their cloud adoption journey. IBM is excited to take Coca-Cola European Partners on this next chapter of their cloud journey delivering on an industry-specific solution as they migrate mission critical workloads to the cloud," adds Howard Boville, SVP IBM Cloud.
"By selecting IBM for its hybrid cloud environment with decades of industry expertise and experience, CCEP is embarking on a journey towards an open and secure cloud architecture driving greater digital advancement,” he concludes.