British American Tobacco moves to cloud

British American Tobacco has embarked on a multi-year IT project that will see it embrace cloud services while streamlining its global data centre and SAP environment.

The tobacco giant has signed a seven-year, $203 million deal with Deutsche Telekom's IT subsidiary T-Systems to transition to a managed infrastructure-as-a-service environment.

"As a result of this deal, British American Tobacco will buy much of its IT dynamically to increase flexibility at work and to reduce costs," the firms said in a statement.

The tobacco firm will spend the next two years slimming down its SAP portfolio to a single hosted instance that runs across all 65 markets it participates in worldwide by 2016.

"British American Tobacco and T-Systems will transition the business software into the cloud so that SAP services will exactly mirror British American Tobacco's cyclical demands and will couple cost to real usage," the two firms said.

British American Tobacco also plans to consolidate its 10 data centres globally down to three facilities in Europe, Asia and South America.

The tobacco firm has Australian operations in Maroubra, south of Sydney.