Coca-Cola European Partners signs Cloud IBM deal

CCEP, which is the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler based on revenue, said the deal would accelerate its transformation to an open hybrid cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  

The key priority, it said, was to streamline its existing IT infrastructure to create a platform for standardised business processes, data and technology. The move is designed to reduce its operational expenses, increase IT resilience and apply analytics and Artificial Intelligence more effectively in its operations. 

Hybrid Cloud

As part of the agreement, IBM Services, will help CCEP transition 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 CCEP, 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.”

Industry-specific solution

Howard Boville, SVP IBM Cloud, said: “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 CCEP on this next chapter of their cloud journey delivering on an industry-specific solution as they migrate mission critical workloads to the cloud.” 

IBM and CCEP began their journey to the Cloud in 2018, when IBM moved one third of CCEP’s enterprise workloads from a dedicated US data centre to the IBM Cloud in Europe.

At the end of last year CCEP revealed it was opening a new £20m line at its Edmonton factory in North London as part of a wider £150m investment in its UK operations.