Coca-Cola Amatil boosts CRM capabilities with IBM Cloud

Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) has signed a multi-million dollar agreement to move its Asia Pacific customer planning and relationship management systems to IBM’s pay-per-use cloud.

CCA said hosting the workloads in IBM’s two SoftLayer cloud centres in Sydney and Melbourne will provide a more agile environment to quickly respond to customer needs and will deliver significant annual savings.

The agreement followed cost and management issues for CCA as a result of fluctuating demand for its product, usually due to seasonal changes or major events. By relying on external cloud services, CCA hopes to achieve the capacity to match customer demand, in a secure and reliable environment.

Over the next six months, CCA plans to 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.

“Our business requires the highest levels of customer service, 24/7,” said Barry Simpson, group CIO at CCA. “We have large transaction volumes which vary significantly depending on factors like location, day, season and what’s on.

“The move to SoftLayer provides us with a 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.”

IBM first launched on-shore SoftLayer cloud services in Melbourne and Sydney in 2014 as part of the vendor’s US$1.2 billion global investment to build 15 new data centres around the world.

This followed the creation of the IBM Watson Group in January 2014 as a new business unit run by IBM to develop and commercialise cloud-delivered cognitive and big data innovations.

The CCA contract builds on the five-year multi-million dollar cloud agreement that CCA signed with IBM in 2014 to manage its mission-critical SAP infrastructure in IBM’s Sydney cloud centre

IBM SoftLayer customers in the region also include the Scentre Group, Rightship, Loft Group and HotelsCombined. Tech startup customers include Digital Market Square, Bugwolf, Cartesian and Portland Software.