Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated is the largest bottler of a wide variety of Coca-Cola beverages in the United States, including the traditional fizzy soda that is famous across the globe. To give you an idea of the scale of its operation, CCB sells 18,000 beverages per hour and uses between three to six 17,000 gallon rail cars of corn syrup per day at its Charlotte-based facility alone. I’m not here to comment on the consumption of fizzy, sugary drinks in the United States (mostly because it’s probably not much better in the UK) – but needless to say, there is obviously huge demand. CCB has been bottling for decades, and like most companies that have lived through a number of technology revolutions, it is sitting on a pile of legacy infrastructure that isn’t the most flexible, or the most scalable. However, this isn’t stopping CIO Onyeka Nchege, who was speaking this week at Cloud World Forum in London.
Nchege told delegates that Coca Cola Bottling is heading for the cloud, and is heading there at pace, where it plans to have not only its fringe applications in the cloud in the next three to five years, but also most of its critical systems (including ERP). Initially this is going to mostly involve a private cloud strategy, but he also insists that over that period the company will be looking to incorporate public cloud into its portfolio. CCB has already begun shifting some “non-critical apps” to the cloud, including HR.
However, Nchege began discussing the company’s cloud plans by pulling up a Gartner chart that listed ‘the main barriers to the cloud’ for any enterprise – or something along those lines. The chart illustrated that technology was at the bottom of the list of barriers, with management, culture and operational processes coming out on top. Nchege’s reason for bringing the chart to our attention was that he wanted to warn others that when you pursue a cloud strategy not to rush to the technology – as one would expect those working in IT to do. Instead, he urged, CIOs and their teams should spend their time getting to know the business processes and try and get an idea of what the business actually wants, before you spring cloud apps on them.
This may seem obvious to those leading in cloud out there, but you’d be surprised how often this just doesn’t happen. I’ve heard numerous examples in recent weeks of where new flexible and scalable systems have been sprung business users, without any prior education or understanding of the business needs, and they have flopped. What often happens is that an education process then has to begin after the systems are already live – but let’s face it, this is a back to front way of doing things, and most likely a waste of money and time. Your IT team needs to become a business team focused on cloud. Nchege said:
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Date: June 17, 2014