ANS sees the cloud in Costa Coffee

The Manchester-based MSP to assist UK café chain with migration to AWS cloud

ANS Group has brewed up a partnership with high street café chain Costa Coffee, supporting its transition to the cloud.

The Manchester-based service provider will migrate Costa's key systems into the AWS cloud which it claimed will assist the UK's largest coffee chain to expand internationally while also improving customer experience and loyalty.

The coffee shop chain has 2,467 stores and self-service Express machines dotted across the UK and was acquired by Coca Cola earlier this year.

"We are absolutely delighted to be working with such an ambitious and creative digital business that operates in a fast-paced market," stated Andy Barrow, ANS CTO.

"This project will enable Costa Coffee to lay the foundation to not only expand but to improve the way they interact and engage with their customers via tablets, apps and their service machines.

"Coffee is one of the fastest-growing beverage segments in the world, with sales increasing by six per cent in the past 12 months alone so it's great to see Costa driving forward on their cloud-first strategy to ensure they have the agility they need to succeed and grow into the world's largest coffee chain."

ANS has recently undergone a radical transformation which saw it "burn" its hardware reseller business in favour of becoming a cloud services-led business.

Phil Scully, CIO at Costa Coffee, added: "We decided to partner with ANS to deliver our ambitious cloud strategy because they demonstrated such strong service maturity and tooling. Their organisational structure provided us with the confidence we needed to consistently feel supported and we look forward to working closely with ANS to optimise and manage our cloud environment as we continue to scale globally.

"The acquisition by Coca-Cola has shifted our horizons significantly and we now have to be far more agile in terms of getting into markets that are further away.

"The acquisition has brought that global scale and global pace to the forefront of our expansion strategy, but we still need to maintain the operational efficiency and operation tooling that will manage our business and capacity planning which is a bigger part of our agenda as we go forward."