A five-year partnership deal between PepsiCo and Microsoft Cloud

PepsiCo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Monday have announced a five-year partnership, where Microsoft will provide a cloud base system which helps Pepsico’s ability to meet the rising demand for its foods and beverages and even drive more innovative techniques to its operations and enhance customer experiences. Microsoft cloud software Azure stood second in the US cloud market after Amazon AWS and ahead of Google Cloud. Microsoft had created its unique presence by racking up a string of high-profile contracts. 

As part of the agreement, PepsiCo will roll out Microsoft 365 as well as its teams to all its 2.7 million employees worldwide. In return, Microsoft will provide a cloud platform to increase its ability to drive new insights from its new estate to improve customer intimacy and product innovations. 

The products made by PepsiCo is consumed over 1 billion times a day across 200 plus countries and various territories all over the world. According to the data collected, it has been observed that PepsiCo generated net revenue of $67 billion last year. PepsiCo’s product portfolio includes a wide range of foods and beverages and a vast variety of brands that generates more than $1 billion in revenue each. You may have heard some brands under PepsiCo like Frito-Ray, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Quaker, and Tropicana. Yes, That is all. These are our day-to-day beverages available at nearby grocery stores. Microsoft will be helping PepsiCo to drive better efficiency to the supply chain, and provide proper service availability from farmers to consumers.

At the press release, PepsiCo, CIO, Seth Cohen, said that As the global leader of food and beverages, our commitment to deliver PepsiCo products on time is of major importance. Through our partnership with Microsoft, their aim to improve service delivery capacity to meet the rise in demand for essential goods while driving new innovations to make our workforce stronger and more resilient to the future. 

This partnership will bring digital technologies with the help of cloud and AI capabilities in the traditional supply chain and retail methods. Microsoft collaboration with mobile communication and PepsiCo’s workforce will bring a base value to the company. It is a win situation for Microsoft and eventually ends up convincing more users to access Microsoft Azure. And, giving its software strong consideration than before!

But will this deal actually improve the services offered by PepsiCo?

Well, it is expected that this partnership will fuel PepsiCo’s operations and its innovation plans by using cloud capabilities while providing Microsoft to expand its relationship in global-leading businesses. However, it involves high levels of risks and uncertainty that could cause the result to differ from the predicted one. The risks are not limited to the spread of Covid-19 or change in the future demand for PepsiCo’s products. The uncertainty in the forward-looking scenarios can be dependent on the adverse effect on the price of PepsiCo’s trading securities or it can be the financial performance. Though, it can’t be really stated how the economy will be moving in the upcoming days. 

On the other hand, where Microsoft is expanding its presence in the food and beverage sector. There was a similar five year deal signed between Coca-Cola and Microsoft on April 27th. Microsoft to provide its AI and cloud-based services with its full suite tool containing Microsoft 365, Dynamic 365, and Azure. It is mainly to improve the company’s engagement with farmers and consumers. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft also joined hands with U.S. based finance firm MSCI, with the aim to accelerate innovation among the global investment industry. MSCI will be migrating its existing products and services using Azure. And, majorly to perform analytics solutions.

However, it has been observed that these types of partnerships, where traditional methods are shifting towards the use of digital technologies to improve their internal structure, came in place, as a result of a global pandemic which makes the employees work remotely. Therefore, it is not much of a surprise, that the IT companies offering online software like Microsoft, IBM are generating huge amounts of revenues amid Covid-19.