Coca-Cola European Partners accelerates its strategic transformation
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, enterprises around the world are looking to modernize their operations. According to a recent IBM® Institute for Business Value study, 62% of executives surveyed now plan to accelerate digital transformation and cloud adoption efforts over the next two years.
With this acceleration comes the need for deploying complex ERP and business process workloads in a way that provides clients with the industry’s highest levels of security¹.
Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler based on revenue, has signed a multiyear agreement with IBM to accelerate its transformation to an open hybrid cloud environment, including SAP workloads.
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 center to IBM Cloud® in Europe.
¹Based on IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Service, the only service in the industry built on FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified hardware.
Over the next two years
of executives plan to accelerate digital transformation
For IBM and CCEP
was the year their journey to the cloud began
“Extending our partnership with IBM will deliver significant technology advantages for our business,” says Peter Brickley, Chief Information Officer at CCEP. “It will allow us to fully modernize our IT environment and will also increase IT resiliency, at a time when demand for online orders and services are increasing.”
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.
A key priority for CCEP is to streamline its existing IT infrastructure to create a platform for standardized business processes, data and technology. This will create a springboard from which to apply data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI technologies to provide new insights across its operations to help drive further efficiencies.
Modernizing applications
As part of the agreement, IBM Services®, with its deep industry expertise, will help CCEP transform to an IBM hybrid cloud environment managed by IBM, including the use of the IBM public cloud.
CCEP is deploying several large SAP workloads — including SAP ERP and SAP® BW/4 HANA — as part of its hybrid transformation. The work is designed to help CCEP deliver higher levels of service to its customers by applying advanced analytics while retaining a reliable infrastructure.
“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,” says Brickley.
IBM will help CCEP modernize its IT environment by using the Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® operating system (OS) to provide an open standard, cost-effective platform. A cornerstone of this transition will be the Red Hat OpenShift® solution, the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform, which will allow CCEP to build mission-critical applications once and run them on the IBM public cloud.
“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,” says Brickley.
Laying the foundation for the future
CCEP will use the IBM Multicloud Management capability to allow integration and management of the legacy systems and private and public clouds from a single dashboard, providing the organization with a consolidated view and one point of control over its entire IT infrastructure.
By selecting IBM — with its decades of industry expertise and experience — for its hybrid cloud environment, CCEP is embarking on a journey toward an open and secure cloud architecture, driving greater digital advancement.
The move to the cloud is designed to reduce CCEP’s operational expenses and increase IT resiliency.
“Most importantly, the move to the cloud will also enhance our service to customers, by leveraging analytics and AI to improve our operations and business insights,” says Brickley. “We have more to do, but this agreement is a key milestone in our journey to grow our business and deliver even greater efficiencies from our IT systems.”
IBM recently acquired several new SAP certifications — adding to its portfolio of more than 100 solutions tested and certified by SAP — to give customers more choices around where and how to run their SAP workloads. These choices will allow clients running SAP workloads on IBM infrastructure to access SAP applications in an optimized, quality-controlled way. The new certifications include:
• IBM Power® Systems Virtual Server, which helps customers modernize their SAP workloads with the option to run them in a virtualized infrastructure hosted in IBM data centers. With this certification, IBM can run SAP HANA® or SAP NetWeaver® platform-based applications within its virtual server stack. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is a private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering with access to the full catalog of IBM Cloud offerings.
• Intel Virtual Server on virtual private cloud, which gives customers the option to run SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA on Intel virtual servers running on IBM Cloud.
About Coca-Cola European Partners plc
CCEPExternal Link was founded in 2016 when Coca-Cola Enterprises, Coca-Cola Iberian Partners and Coca-Cola Erfrischungsgetränke merged. The company is the largest Coca-Cola bottling company based on revenue, working with 19,000 suppliers and serving one million customer outlets. CCEP employs approximately 23,300 people in 13 markets and is headquartered in the UK.
About Coca-Cola European Partners plc
CCEPExternal Link was founded in 2016 when Coca-Cola Enterprises, Coca-Cola Iberian Partners and Coca-Cola Erfrischungsgetränke merged. The company is the largest Coca-Cola bottling company based on revenue, working with 19,000 suppliers and serving one million customer outlets. CCEP employs approximately 23,300 people in 13 markets and is headquartered in the UK.
