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Coca-Cola Enterprises, Coke's largest bottling company is becoming Microsoft's largest software-as-a-service customer to date, contracting for 35,000 employees to get their e-mail and other collaboration capabilities via a subscription service. InformationWeek has the story on why.
By later this year, most of the 35,000 knowledge workers at Coca-Cola Enterprises, known as CCE, will have moved from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook with Exchange Online, the SaaS version of Microsoft's e-mail server. It's the first piece of a larger move to Microsoft collaboration tools that CCE hopes will bring the company the ease of management and the consistent user experience of an integrated suite. The switch to a hosted model, which will take place over the next year, also will include SharePoint Online for ad hoc team collaboration and content management, Live Meeting for Web conferencing, and Office Communications Server Online for unified communications.
CIO Esat Sezer eventually wants to include CCE's mobile workers--30,000 employees stock 25,000 trucks and replenish 600,000 vending machines a day, reaching a million distinct locations--in the company's collaboration plans as well.
Still, collaboration is only one reason for CCE choosing Microsoft. The other piece is the services dimension, which CCE saw as a way to accelerate deployment, cut energy costs, and free up IT staff for more strategic projects. "This is not a head-count reduction," Sezer says. "We love having these resources to do further simplification, further virtualization, and to work on strategic IT initiatives."
Like Coke, CCE has been under pressure as people seek out healthier drinks over soda, and commodity costs squeeze profits. CCE lost $4.8 billion in the second quarter, due mostly to a one-time asset write-down based on an expected decline in North American operating income, and North American sales fell 1.5% as steep gas prices hurt convenience store business in 20-ounce bottles of soda and Dasani water.
A change agenda across the $21 billion-a-year company has goals of keeping it No. 1 or 2 in every market it's in, overhauling its distribution, and acquiring talent to drive growth. The communication tools are a starting point. "It became clear that we had to communicate these changes quickly," says Key. "The quick shift is the competitive differentiation, because the market is changing."
Posted at 11:55 AM in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) | Permalink
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