Coca-Cola Selling Atlanta Data Center as it Shifts Apps to Cloud

Coca-Cola is one of the big corporations shrinking the amount of data center capacity they operate on their own by moving more and more applications to cloud service providers.

The company’s Atlanta data center is up for sale, according to the commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle. The facility is nearly 90,000 square feet.

Amazon, Google, and other cloud providers host more than 20 percent of Coke’s computing environment today, which could go up to 50 percent in the next two to three years, the beverage company’s CIO Ed Steinike recently told the Wall Street Journal.

Like many other corporate giants, Coke wants to take advantage of the infrastructure flexibility enabled by cloud services and the new technologies they enable it to use – technologies the company would take a long time and a lot of money to develop support for on its own. Those are things like mobile workforce, latest security tools, and user interface design capabilities.

Read more: How Juniper Went from 18 Data Centers to One

The WSJ article also highlights corporate data center consolidation via cloud by General Electric and a mentions a recent warning to investors by JP Morgan Chase that traditional IT infrastructure vendors are under a serious threat.

Gartner expects spending on public cloud services worldwide to grow 16 percent this year, reaching more than $204 billion, while forecasting global IT spending to decline half a percent from last year to $3.49 trillion.

Read more on the WSJ site.