Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler based on revenue, has signed a multiyear agreement with IBM (NYSE: IBM) to accelerate its transformation to an open hybrid cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The move is designed to reduce its operational expenses, increase IT resiliency and leverage analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its daily operations 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. This will create a springboard from which to leverage data analytics, IoT and AI technologies to provide new insights across its operations to help drive further efficiencies.
As part of the agreement, IBM Services, with its deep industry expertise, will help CCEP transform to a IBM hybrid cloud environment managed by IBM, including the use of IBM public cloud, and several large SAP workloads. IBM will also provide CCEP with a consolidated view and single point of control over its entire IT infrastructure.
Peter Brickley, Chief Information Officer of Coca-Cola European Partners, said: “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.”
“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,” said 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.”
IBM will help CCEP modernize its IT environment by using Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide an open standard, cost-effective platform. A cornerstone of this transition will be Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform, which will allow CCEP to build mission-critical applications once and run them on IBM public cloud . IBM’s Multicloud Management capability will be used to allow the legacy systems, private and public clouds, to be integrated and managed from a single dashboard.
IBM and CCEP began their journey to the Cloud in 2018, when IBM successfully moved one third of CCEP’s enterprise workloads from a dedicated US data centre to the IBM Cloud in Europe.
