How UCC Coffee Moved to the Cloud Without Missing a Beat

Customer Overview

UCC Coffee is one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest coffee suppliers, serving the cafés, convenience stores, quick-service restaurants and offices that keep the country caffeinated.  

Operating across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, as part of a Japan‑headquartered group, UCC Coffee’s IT environment is as complex as its supply chain. When ageing infrastructure and vendor price increases created a compelling case for change, UCC Coffee turned to Interactive to navigate a high-stakes migration to Microsoft Azure. 

Business Challenges

UCC Coffee’s IT Manager ANZ, Greg Wratt, leads a lean team responsible for the entire technology environment across multiple business units and around 500 users. For years, the organisation ran its server workloads on-premise through a private cloud environment built on VMware, but these converging pressures made the status quo unsustainable.

First, a significant portion of their servers had fallen out of support. Upgrading those servers had previously been quoted but never gained traction internally. Second, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware triggered price increases, fundamentally changing the economics of staying put.
  
The organisation needed a path that would reduce costs, modernise the environment and do it all without taking down business-critical systems that, if offline for even a day, could halt coffee deliveries across ANZ. 

For Greg, the risk of downtime was tangible: “if our system was to go down, the business goes down… and it’s $1,000,000 a day if it goes down.” 

Solution

Interactive identified Microsoft Azure as the right destination for UCC Coffee’s workloads, while recommending that heavier back-end systems remain on private cloud. This hybrid approach delivered the cost and performance benefits of the public cloud where it made sense, without forcing workloads into an environment that wasn’t the right fit.

Critically, Interactive helped UCC Coffee secure Microsoft funding to offset a large portion of the migration and modernisation cost. 

With UCC Coffee’s Microsoft tenancy and Global agreement based in Japan and the relationship with Microsoft managed by the Global parent company, Interactive helped take the complexity away around tying together the commercial process with obtaining partner funding between both local and Global partner teams, which was far from straightforward, though made a material impact to UCC’s ROI in the whole process.

Once the commercial framework was in place, Interactive managed the migration end-to-end. They pre-built servers, scheduled overnight cutovers and handling all the technical complexity so Greg’s team could stay focused on the business. 

Building Around the Customer   

One of the defining features of the engagement was the trust built between Interactive and UCC Coffee over time, and the quality of communication that underpinned it.

Because UCC Coffee’s parent company in Japan had its own standards and requirements around Microsoft tenancy, the project required careful stakeholder management across time zones and organisational boundaries. Interactive worked patiently through that process, adapting the plan as requirements evolved and helping make the case to global leadership that the migration was safe, commercially sound and aligned with group standards.

“We would be completely lost without Interactive,” said Greg. “But the relationship is fantastic. They talk to us on a human level. They don’t spit out three-letter acronyms. They tell me what it does, why I need it, then they look after it.”

That clarity extended to board-level conversations. Greg noted that Interactive’s ability to communicate in plain language made it possible to put them in front of his CFO with confidence.

For Interactive’s part, the relationship works in both directions. “Greg and his team are very willing to listen and hear us,” said Ivan Ristic, Account Manager at Interactive. “It’s a good dynamic both ways, it’s one of the reasons we can do our best work.”

Getting Real Results

The migration was completed in stages between May and October 2025, with the full Azure cutover finalised in October. This followed an extended period of planning and stakeholder alignment with UCC’s Japan‑based parent company and Microsoft tenant arrangements. Despite the scale and complexity of the project – encompassing servers, disaster recovery infrastructure and around 500 users – the transition was virtually invisible to the business. 

“It was a breeze, and meant our supply to our major customers and local cafes was not interrupted. It was a good sign that no one noticed anything change overnight – if anything, things were working better and faster,” said Greg. 

No complaints. No downtime. No disruption to the coffee supply chain.

Value

The migration delivered value across several dimensions simultaneously. 

Moving front-end workloads to Azure, modernising and simplifying the overall solution generated an approx 40% monthly saving. Microsoft funding covered a substantial portion of migration costs, effectively self-funding the migration and modernisation tasks. 

The migration brought all servers onto modern, fully supported operating system versions, work that had stalled for years as a standalone project. A new security operations capability was also added as part of the engagement, giving UCC Coffee greater protection and risk management capability across the ANZ environment, with flow-on benefits for the broader global group.

With the environment now on a modern, scalable foundation, incremental updates and patches are straightforward. This means when UCC Coffee recently announced plans to open a new site, Greg simply sent an email, and Interactive handled the rest.

“I sent an email saying we’re opening another site, just providing the address. Within a few hours, Interactive were already getting the internet connected! I don’t need to contact Telstra or anyone. It just happens.”

Key Benefits

• Hybrid cloud strategy combining Azure and private cloud for optimal cost and performance 
• Microsoft funding secured to offset migration costs, despite a complex multi-jurisdiction tenant arrangement 
• Server estate and power system fully upgraded to supported, modern OS versions as part of the migration, at no additional cost 
• Zero business disruption across around 500 staff in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore 
• Significantly improved security posture with managed security operations and extended secure network 
• Ongoing fully managed support, freeing a three-person IT team to focus on strategic work 
• A trusted, long-term partnership that scales with the business