Beverage manufacturer and distributor Frucor is moving its 10-years SAP investment into the cloud.
Fujitsu won the tender and will both host and provide base support for SAP from its Homebush data centre in Sydney.
Previously, Frucor’s SAP hosting was done by Unisys.
The move to Fujitsu coincides with the company tackling the European markets where its products will be distributed by a subsidiary of Frucor’s owner, Suntory.
“We launched this month into Spain and we’ll continue to target Europe market by market,” says group IS manager Paul Miller.
Frucor’s brands include Fresh-Up, Mizone, Pepsi, V, H2go and Just Juice. The popular V brand, which was created in New Zealand, is the number one energy drink in Australia and New Zealand.
The company is headquartered in Auckland where it employs around 900 staff.
“We’d found in the past that when you signed a three-year outsourcing contract you didn’t need all the power at the start, then you ran out of disk space. That sort of system never worked well,” Miller says.
“Our business is growing at such a rate, we needed flexibility and hardware optimised for that kind of approach. Fujitsu had that as well as a decent depth of SAP capability, both here and globally.
“They give us scale and resiliency across multiple machines.”
Miller says it is quite new in the SAP community to do hosting like that.
“We’re expecting less than a year payback to put it into the cloud,” he says. “We’ve got other systems we’re looking to put into the same cloud.”
These include Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, currently run in-house in Auckland but which come to end-of-life this year.
The switchover to Fujitsu is scheduled for April. Fujitsu will provide the service delivery management, SAP support, and the transition and management of Frucor’s core applications.
Miller says the business is seasonal with a summer peak for its products. “We will now have an IT model which is able to respond to our business activities and market conditions as and when required.”
Suntory’s strategy is to move its global infrastructure into the cloud. It has a strong existing relationship with Fujitsu, which had a bearing on the decision. “It still had to make commercial sense to us because Frucor is responsible for the investment,” Miller says.