Cloudy future for Coca-Cola Amatil

Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) has announced a five-year multi-million dollar contract to host its SAP infrastructure in IBM’s Sydney data centre.

According to the drinks bottler and distributor, the cloud project is expected to reduce operational costs in Australia and eventually in Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Samoa. This is because the IBM facility will be a cloud hub for the rest of its South Pacific operations.

CCA Group CIO Barry Simpson said that Australia and Indonesia will be the first countries to start using the cloud platform to improve order management and distribution processes.

“We have a complex distribution network which requires our systems to be very efficient,” he said in a statement.

“Indonesia is a vastly different market to Australia, as it has a more diverse trade to support across both online ordering and traditional channels such as vending machines. By using a common cloud platform, we will be able standardise and automate our operations and bring a consistent level of efficiency to our Indonesian business.”

The cloud platform will allow CCA to scale up the OAiSys platform for Indonesia volumes at price points that make commercial sense for the company.

“We currently have the OAiSys back office and supply chain solution live in Indonesia, however it’s the front office capability that we would like to expand and this is where the transaction volume is,” Simpson said.

He added that the deal means CCA will retain its IT operations in Sydney while reducing costs through using cloud computing.

“The key to us is not to lose the performance and reliability of our core production systems,” said Simpson.

“The IBM cloud solution delivers this reliability at lower price points. This opens up opportunities to us, for example we can cost effectively manage the high Indonesia transaction volumes. In a traditional model you provision hardware for largest peak volume – that is a very expensive way to do business.”

In August 2013, Simpson told CIO Australia that it was in the process of moving traditional SAP platforms to a hosted model.

He also said the need to enable corporate access from anywhere and on any platform means businesses must embrace cloud and work through whatever issues it presents, be they financial or security related.

In October 2013, CCA Australia CIO Warwick Hutton, who works with Simpson, said that it had focused on a replacement of more than 170 legacy systems ranging from call centre systems to production planning as part of its Oasis project.

The company migrated off Lotus Notes to Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in 2010. CCA also uses the vendor’s Office 365 and Azure cloud services

“People can get access to their email off any device wherever they want. Prior to that, we were using a traditional laptop, virtual private network [VPN] system and it was just too hard for staff to get into our system,” said Hutton at the time.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow CIO Australia on Twitter and Like us on Facebook… Twitter: @CIO_Australia, Facebook: CIO Australia, or take part in the CIO conversation on LinkedIn: CIO Australia