IBM has agreed a multi-year partnership with Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) to accelerate the company’s hybrid cloud transformation. 

The firm behind the famous soft drink will be using an open hybrid cloud environment with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

The aim is to reduce its operational expenses, increase IT resiliency and use analytics and AI in its daily operations to bring enhanced business insights and deliver greater service to its customers.
 
A key priority for CCEP is to streamline its existing IT infrastructure to create a platform for standardised business processes, data and technology. From that groundwork, it hopes to build data analytics, IoT and AI technologies to provide new insights across its business to help drive further efficiencies.
 
The agreement includes 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.

“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,” said Peter Brickley, CIO of Coca-Cola European Partners.

“The selection of IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture with Red Hat OpenShift gives us the flexibility to optimise across different public cloud platforms according to our future needs.”
 
IBM and CCEP have been working together since 2018 when IBM successfully moved one-third of its enterprise workloads from a dedicated US data centre to the IBM Cloud in Europe.
 
A cornerstone of this transition will be Red Hat OpenShift and its comprehensive Kubernetes platform, which will allow CCEP to build mission-critical applications and run them on IBM public cloud. This will include IBM’s Multicloud Management service, which will be used to integrated legacy systems, private and public clouds into a single dashboard.
 
“As businesses shift to cloud, we understand that each industry and client has unique business needs in their cloud adoption journey,” 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.”