EPAM Helps Bacardi Accelerate Digital Marketing and E-Commerce Transformation

Newly revamped technology ecosystem uses AWS DevOps Automation to increase time-to-market and improve the consumer’s online shopping experience

• What’s the News: EPAM and Bacardi partner to revamp their digital marketing technology ecosystem, using DevOps automation—to improve brand consistency, speed up time-to-market and deliver significant operational cost savings.
• Why it’s important: As consumer buying behaviors continue to shift online, Bacardi needed to put their customer at the heart of the commerce experience—to offer consistent, innovative and connected digital experiences, while keeping costs under control.
• Who it affects: Global businesses

EPAM Systems, Inc., a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and software development services,  announced the successful launch of Bacardi’s new end-to-end, automated DevOps platform. Leveraging the company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) expertise, EPAM helped transform the technology ecosystem for Bacardi—the largest privately held spirits company in the world—to enable them to accelerate the launch of innovative, connected e-commerce solutions, while enhancing the consumer’s search-to-checkout experience.

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Innovating e-commerce experiences has been part of the long-term strategy for Bacardi for several years and a key lever for future growth opportunities. With COVID-19 shutting down a significant part of the spirits world—bars, restaurants, and hospitality—Bacardi accelerated its strategy to enhance its digital presence and meet consumers online where they were now shopping. Bacardi turned to EPAM, as an experienced AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to revolutionize their digital marketing platform with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline with a self-service (infrastructure as code) platform and infrastructure orchestration components. By optimizing its digital marketing platform and adopting a DevOps culture, EPAM helped Bacardi transform their technology ecosystem to deliver 16X greater website deployment capacity and a significant reduction in infrastructure costs. Importantly, the project also enabled new features, including seamless shopping journeys on core brand websites, so that consumers could move from searching, to browsing, to ordering products, with the click of a button.

“Direct-to-consumer sales is going to become a critical lifeline for the spirits industry and those that succeed will need to be able to pivot quickly,” said Jason Harman, Co-Head, Global Business at EPAM Systems. “Our agile methodology, combined with a forward-thinking partnership approach, allowed Bacardi to successfully support the new digital shopping expectations of their consumers.”

“As a family-owned business for more than 158 years, Bacardi has always put the consumer at the heart of everything we do. In today’s digital world, that includes understanding where and how they are looking for our brands and products and making that as easy as possible for them,” said Sheryl Richardson, Senior Operations Manager, Digital Marketing at Bacardi. “With EPAM’s expertise, we were able to offer more seamless online consumer journeys, launch new capabilities including e-commerce, and automate deployments across a digital portfolio that included more than 150 websites and 2,500 web domains.”

In October 2019, Bacardi and EPAM were awarded the Best Overall DevOps Project in Retail at the DevOps Industry Awards in London.

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As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, EPAM works with its global customers to design, migrate, build and support sophisticated cloud applications on AWS with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability. EPAM leveraged its AWS expertise—including having achieved AWS Migration Competency, AWS DevOps Competency, and AWS Well-Architected Partner designations—to help transform Bacardi’s digital marketing platform with DevOps Automation. Today, EPAM has more than 2,000 AWS engineers, who have delivered more than 300 projects. Additionally, EPAM has developed several DevOps accelerators, with multi-tiered capabilities, to quickly meet the needs of its global customers.

“In today’s business climate, time is of the essence and by utilizing an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, like EPAM, businesses are able to quickly pivot and realize the benefits of increased flexibility and scale a DevOps platform on AWS provides,” said Amanda Sleight, EMEA SI Partner Lead, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are pleased to support EPAM in creating an innovative solution for Bacardi—driving better customer engagement, greater website deployment capacity and a vast reduction in infrastructure costs.”

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