hybrid cloud
Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) is the world's largest Coca-Cola bottler based on revenue. Credit: himanshu Chaudhary on Unsplash

Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), the largest Coca-Cola bottler based on revenue in the world, has signed a multiyear agreement with IBM to speed up its transformation to an open hybrid cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This agreement is intended to help CCEP cut down its operational expenses, boost IT resiliency and tap analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its daily operations to gain enhanced business insights and offer better service to customers.

An important focus for CCEP is to streamline its current IT infrastructure to have a platform with standardised business processes, data and technology. This will help the firm to leverage data analytics, IoT and AI technologies and gain new insights across its operations to boost efficiencies.

Under the agreement, IBM Services will help CCEP to transform to IBM hybrid cloud environment which will be managed by IBM and this will include the use of IBM public cloud, and several big SAP workloads.

Furthermore, IBM will also offer CCEP with a consolidated view and single point of control over its complete IT infrastructure.

Coca-Cola European Partners chief information officer Peter Brickley 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.”

IBM Cloud SVP Howard Boville 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 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.

“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 aid CCEP in modernising its IT environment by using Red Hat Enterprise Linux to offer an open standard, cost-effective platform.

A basis for this transition will be Red Hat OpenShift, which is a comprehensive Kubernetes platform that will allow CCEP to develop mission-critical applications once and run them on IBM public cloud.

Multicloud Management capability of IBM will be leveraged to enable the legacy systems, private and public clouds, to be integrated and managed from a single dashboard.

The partnership between IBM and CCEP began in 2018 when IBM moved one-third of CCEP’s enterprise workloads from a US data centre to the IBM Cloud in Europe.