Coca-Cola says frame goes better with Equant

by Denise Pappalardo

January 3, 2001 —

ATLANTA -- Teaming with a service provider that could reach all 289 Coca-Cola sites was imperative to the multinational beverage company.

That's why Coca-Cola inked a five-year, $47 million contract with Equant to build and manage Coca-Cola's new frame relay network, which will span 250 cities in 87 countries.

"Equant is the best match for us if you look at our footprint and the Equant network," says Claude Marais, director of strategic business relations at the soft drink company. With 70% to 80% of Coca-Cola's revenue coming from countries outside the U.S., it was "a key consideration" that the service provider offer full coverage and management, he says.

Today, Coca-Cola buys frame relay and private-line services from multiple carriers around the world. About a year ago, the beverage company put out a request for proposal to build one network with room to grow that a single carrier could manage. There weren't many providers that offered the same coverage as Equant, Marais says.

More multinational businesses are expected to choose companies such as Equant over international consortia such as Concert and GlobalOne, says Russ McGuire, a vice president at consulting firm TeleChoice.

"Business users have less confidence in the consortium, which gives companies like Equant a leg up over AT&T and WorldCom," he says.

But Equant's advantage may be short lived. AT&T and WorldCom will likely team with more service providers to expand the reach of their networks while offering users a single point of contact that's associated with the AT&T or WorldCom brand, he says.

Equant's international reach is not matched as it has the capabilities to link Coca-Cola's network to its offices in Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America. Equant is provisioning frame relay connections at various speeds at Coca-Cola's sites. All frame relay traffic is transported over Equant's ATM backbone, which is at the core of its frame relay network.

Although Equant is managing the network for Coca-Cola, the beverage company has access to Equant's management systems that let Coca-Cola quickly determine if a particular site may be nearing capacity. The tools are also used to monitor the entire network, specific links and determine trends in network usage.

While Coca-Cola may only provision 128K bit/sec links at some of its smaller locations, the company can more easily upgrade to higher data rates. Coca-Cola is in the process of expanding its support of SAP throughout the entire company, Marais says, so it's important that Equant can easily increase speeds to support bandwidth-intensive applications.

Next up, 'Net access

Coca-Cola is also using the network to support several custom Web applications and all the company's data traffic, Marais explains. The Equant deal does not include support for Internet access.

Later this year, Coca-Cola plans to consolidate its purchase of Internet access services as it has with its frame relay services. Today, the beverage company works with several ISPs throughout the world, hoping to eventually work with only one.

Equant also offered Coca-Cola flexible service-level agreements.

"In some areas we have extremely high availability requirements," Marais says. He says the service provider is offering 97% to 100% network availability guarantees depending on location.

Network World