In China – when you drink Coca-Cola, Sprite, or Fanta – a joint venture of China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) and Coca-Cola, as well as Huawei’s ICT is standing behind their production, sales, and distribution. Now, COFCO Coca-Cola has chosen Huawei‘s FusionCube converged appliance solution. In addition, COFCO Coca-Cola selected Huawei’s FusionServer server, OceanStor 5500 V3 storage system, and FusionSphere cloud operating system.
In 2000, COFCO and Coca-Cola, both Fortune Global 500 companies, set up COFCO Coca-Cola Beverage Co., Ltd. (COFCO Coca-Cola), in which COFCO holds 65% of shares while Coca-Cola owns the remaining 35%. COFCO Coca-Cola is the only Coca-Cola bottling group controlled by a Chinese-funded enterprise in China. COFCO Coca-Cola’s IT business systems consist of the following three parts:
“Our original network infrastructure was unable to support our ICT transformation strategy,” said Li Zhihong of COFCO Coca-Colaʼs Information Management Department. “After about one year of research, we decided to build a cloud platform and use cloud infrastructure to support our core business systems such as ERP and CRM.”
- Front-end application systems – including sales data, logistics, Office Automation (OA), and external communication management systems: These systems support daily beverage sales, retail store visits, logistics, dispatch, and other businesses. After customers place orders, freight drivers use a warehouse application system to “easily” prioritize orders and work out the most appropriate freight routes. With the system’s built-in mapping and navigation functions, beverages can be “quickly and accurately” delivered to distributors and retail stores.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – COFCO Coca-Cola uses the SAP ERP Central Component (ECC). The core components of SAP ECC include financial management, sales management, production planning, material management, plant maintenance, human resources management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With its front-end application systems, CRM enables a series of activities such as order placing and pricing, partner and service management.
- Portals, reporting systems, and data warehouses – Although COFCO Coca-Colaʼs business systems would be “state-of-the-art”, its legacy network infrastructure was siloed, with a number of core business systems deployed separately. As business types and scope continued to grow, it became clear these traditional architectures weren’t enough. COFCO Coca-Cola faced complex Operation and Maintenance and difficult upgrades and scalability, which hindered new service rollouts in response to fast-changing service needs. COFCO Coca-Cola urgently needed to consolidate its network infrastructure.
Hyper-Converged Cloud Platform
In the past, COFCO Coca-Cola used midrange computers. Currently, x86-based appliances have improved their CPU performance, and the latest appliances, such as those from Huawei, are highly integrated: they incorporate a computing unit, a storage unit, a network unit, and virtualization software.
After considering multiple factors such as CPU performance, integration level, cost-effectiveness, and appliances’ Return on Investment (RoI), COFCO Coca-Cola ultimately chose Huawei’s FusionCube converged appliance solution. In addition, COFCO Coca-Cola selected Huawei’s FusionServer server, OceanStor 5500 V3 storage system, and FusionSphere cloud operating system.
“Many market researchers show that Huawei is increasing its share in the appliance, storage, and server markets,” added Li Zhihong. “I strongly agree that Huawei has strong capabilities in these areas.”
High-Speed Switching
Huawei’s FusionCube is a hyper-converged infrastructure that provides elastic cloud platform capabilities. With Huawei’s FusionCube, COFCO Coca-Cola can set up a unified resources pooling platform to “efficiently” satisfy the needs of business systems including CRM, OA, enterprise mail, and other core business systems. Additionally, IT resources are “efficiently and elastically” deployed.
FusionCube would use an innovative architecture converging computing, storage, and networking resources. It pre-integrates a “high-performance” computing platform, a “high-speed” switching network, a distributed parallel storage system, and virtualization cloud software. As a result, it would implement elastic IT service deployment, expansion, and migration.
Huawei’s OceanStor 5500 V3 storage system enables the integration of multiple controllers and active-active storage area network and network-attached storage nodes. These converged functions make COFCO Coca-Cola’s pursuit of a storage system that would feature higher performance, lower latency, and better elasticity.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Huawei’s FusionSphere is an OpenStack-based cloud operating system designed for customers from a wide range of industries. It would offer powerful virtualization and resource pool management, rich cloud infrastructure components and tools, and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). FusionSphere helps COFCO Coca-Cola horizontally consolidate physical and virtual resources in the data center and vertically optimize business platforms.
Building a cloud platform was just the first step in COFCO Coca-Colaʼs digital transformation journey. The company has additional plans for its digital transformation. For example, the company plans to integrate production line equipment with core business systems through sensor and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. It will also capitalize on Big Data to achieve predictive maintenance and improve production and sales forecasts.
“Huawei has provided us with a series of ICT infrastructure solutions, such as FusionCube, that fully meet our business development needs and conform to our ICT transformation strategy,” added Li Zhihong. “We are looking forward to further cooperation with Huawei.”
