OkTik: The ‘Masters of Migration’ look to SoftwareOne for growth

OkTik successfully automated the technology integration of 50,000 Coca-Cola employees and has now partnered with SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) to make its OneTik migration platform accessible to a broader range of organizations.

When Coca-Cola set out to integrate the technology infrastructure of its numerous European businesses to form Coca-Cola Europe Pacific Partners (CCEP), it hired a major consultancy. But when progress on the integration stalled, the drinks giant took decisive action. They went back to square one and turned to a smaller team of developers, well-known in the industry for their technical work on the $107 billion merger of Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller.

The team – a consultancy called OkTik – built a dedicated migration platform for the integration. This is now available on SoftwareOne’s Cloud-iQ and also distributed on the Azure Marketplace.

“CCEP had a big wish list,” recalls Graham Brant, COO of OkTik. “We had to move 35,000 employees from a disparate set of environments – including Lotus Notes, for example – into a single, Microsoft-focused digital workplace that connected all users and all data without any disruption. CCEP couldn’t afford to slow down the guys packing cans into delivery trucks at 4am every day. So this was our challenge. No data loss, minimal user disruption, and very fast collaboration.”

Rather than carry out a manual integration, OkTik built a platform that would automate the entire process. “You’ve got standalone migration tools that will get you from A to B for SharePoint or Microsoft email,” says Brant, “but these tools only handle a part of the journey. We orchestrate the lot, everything. It doesn't matter what you’ve got: SharePoint, Outlook, Adobe - we automate the entire move.”

The migration engine looks at the current environment so you can start with a clear and accurate picture of what you’re dealing with. What data and applications are sitting where. And how much of it there is.

Then, together with the customer, “outcome scenarios” are defined depending on whether you are in an office, a warehouse worker, or share a PC in a manufacturing plant. “There’s typically about six or seven core scenarios,” adds Brant.

The platform prepares most of the migration process in the background. “You then get a button on your PC that says, ‘You are ready to migrate’. This is why we called our product OneTik - because for the user, that’s all it takes.”

The migration usually takes one to two hours. “When the user logs in with their new email address – but with their existing password – their PC has been completely reimagined. But their notes, favorites plus access to pre-migrated applications have all been preserved so there are no grumbles.”

The second leg of the CCEP project added the Asia-Pacific arm of Coca-Cola to the Microsoft Workplace environment.

For this migration, OkTik rebuilt the platform on Microsoft Azure and made this available as an application through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

The power of the platform is not only a matter of technology but also extends to the business control and outcomes achieved.

“With over 23,000 people to migrate, and all the back-end complexity, we needed real-time reporting to prove it’s working and automated,” says Neil Carlton, CTO of CCEP. “The dashboards allow us to report to the chief information officer or chief executive on the status of migration in every geography at any time and fix any problems as they occur.

“They are used every day and through the COVID-19 crisis actually helped to create real energy as everyone can see the counter ticking up in real-time. To deliver complex change, you need to work effectively with third parties; OkTiK truly integrates with us, creating a one-team spirit focused on solutions.”

When CCEP acquired Coca-Cola Philippines in 2024, OKTik was given the task of migrating its 10,000 employees to a new environment. With the OneTik platform now available on Marketplace, it was a straightforward decision for CCEP to purchase it through this new digital procurement channel.

So what now for OkTiK? After the success of working with CCEP, the plan is to bring the OneTik platform to a wider customer base. And this is where SoftwareOne comes in.

“It's a multifaceted conversation,” Brant says. “Internally, we’ve had to get to grips with managing our own Microsoft Azure consumption, and SoftwareOne has been great in helping us automate that side of things.

“The external part is that we’re making OneTik available to SoftwareOne customers on its Cloud-iQ marketplace. We’ve set up a bunch of separate offers, each related to a specific use case. This should make it clear to people which option is right for them.”

Talking of use cases, the first is ‘Analysis’.

In this instance, OneTik helps you see the lie of the land – screening and optimizing an organization’s app and software license landscape prior to migration. “Funnily enough, this is a great exercise even if you aren’t migrating,” says Brant. “at least one of our clients managed to save $500,000 by optimizing its licenses as a result of our analysis.” This analysis includes locally installed apps on devices, not just cloud-delivered apps.

The use case also helps tackle the problem of shadow IT and app sprawl. “We’re talking to a large enterprise that has around 30,000 apps installed on user devices. In another case, a client managed to reduce complexity by reducing over 1,600 installed apps to under 300.”