Published on the 10/04/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The soft-drinks company CCA has signed a multi-million dollar five-year deal with IBM which will provide CCA with access to its SAP enterprise software supplied as a cloud service…
Just days after SAP announced that it was opening a Sydney based data centre to provide cloud services to Australian and New Zealand businesses CCA revealed a major deal with IBM, initially to support its Australian operations – but eventually taking on the role of providing SAP cloud services to CCA businesses in New Zealand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Samoa.
CCA says it will cut costs and use the cloud-based solution to standardise information systems and operations across the region. Asked by iStart why the company had decided to use IBM to host its SAP system, rather than use SAP’s own newly-opened data centre, CCA Group CIO Barry Simpson said; “We reviewed a number of providers for this agreement with great care as this is a large-scale SAP environment. As well as price and flexibility we considered flawless transition, technology road maps as well as proven capability to deliver. Based on this criteria we awarded the business to IBM.”
Timing may have been an issue also. Although the CCA-IBM deal was formally announced this week – after SAP announced the opening of a local data centre – the arrangement was actually inked a while ago and the companies have been working together on moving CCA’s SAP systems into IBM’s cloud for some weeks.
Over the last five years CCA has rationalised its core computing operations down to two outsourced data centres, one for production and one for disaster recovery. Following this agreement CCA’s data centres won’t be required and its existing infrastructure will be decommissioned. The transition to the new environment is to be completed by the end of the year.
According to Simpson the cloud deal struck with IBM differs from its previous data centre outsourcing arrangement because this is; “A true consumption-based cloud service. It is scalable up and down and allows for immediate changes to capacity, all at market contestable price points.”
This is not the first cloud adventure for the soft drink company – CCA already uses Telstra’s cloud to host its Microsoft Office 365 applications along with its call centre infrastructure.
