Coca-Cola Amatil Improves Consumption-Based Forecasting With Move To IBM Cloud

SYDNEY, Australia -- IBM said it has signed a multimillion-dollar agreement with Coca-Cola Amatil to move its Asia Pacific customer planning and relationship management systems to the IBM Cloud.

CCA is one of Australia's largest 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.

Hosting the workloads in IBM's two SoftLayer cloud centers in Australia will provide Coca-Cola Amatil with a more agile environment to quickly respond to customer needs and deliver significant annual savings, according to IBM. The agreement builds on the five-year multimillion-dollar cloud agreement that CCA signed with IBM last year to manage its infrastructure in its Sydney cloud center.

Demand for Coca-Cola Amatil's beverages is seasonal, influenced daily weather and occurrences of major events, among other factors, IBM pointed out. 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 reportedly provides the flexibility for CCA to produce capacity to match customer demand.

"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."