IBM has announced it has signed a five-year multimillion dollar cloud agreement with Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA). The cloud project will streamline CCA's operations and processes across the South Pacific region and is expected to drive significant operational costs out of the business.

As the bottler and distributor of one of the world's most iconic brands, CCA operates in six countries including Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Samoa. Australia and Indonesia will be the first countries to use the IBM cloud platform to optimise and streamline CCA's order management and distribution processes; increase operational efficiencies; and deliver consistent and exceptional quality of customer experience across the two geographies.

"We have a complex distribution network which requires our systems to be very efficient," explains CCA's CIO Barry Simpson. "Indonesia is a vastly different market to Australia, as it has a more diverse trade to support across both modern and traditional channels. By using a common cloud platform across Australia and Indonesia, we will be able standardize and automate our operations and bring a consistent level of efficiency to our Indonesian business.

"Importantly, this will enable us to focus on growing our market share in Indonesia - which is a major opportunity for us in 2014," said Barry.

Under the agreement, IBM will manage CCA's mission-critical SAP infrastructure in a cloud environment hosted in IBM's data centre in Sydney, Australia, which will eventually act as a cloud hub for the rest of CCA's South Pacific operations.

"CCA's plans to have Sydney serve as a cloud hub for its entire South Pacific footprint via IBM's cloud platform will bring enhanced operational efficiency to its entire organization," said Grant Thomson, Cloud Business Leader, IBM. "CCA will be able to leverage best-practice processes from its Australian operation and apply them to the rest of the South Pacific region."

"CCA is keeping its IT operations in Australia to service its South Pacific operations, and in the process improve efficiency - this is an excellent example of how to leverage the power and flexibility of cloud computing," said Grant.