EPAM Helps Bacardi Accelerate Digital Marketing and E-Commerce Transformation

Report from EPAM Continuum’s trends research group highlights 20 trends across industries and presents businesses with opportunities to embrace change

• 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

Newtown, PA – October 6, 2020 – EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM), a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and software development services, today 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.

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.

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.”

To learn more about EPAM’s AWS Expertise, visit www.epam.com/about/who-we-are/partners/aws

To learn more about Bacardi, visit www.bacardilimited.com.

About EPAM Systems

Since 1993, EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM) has leveraged its software engineering expertise to become a leading global product development, digital platform engineering, and top digital and product design agency. Through its ‘Engineering DNA’ and innovative strategy, consulting, and design capabilities, EPAM works in collaboration with its customers to deliver next-gen solutions that turn complex business challenges into real business outcomes. EPAM’s global teams serve customers in more than 30 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. As a recognized market leader in multiple categories among top global independent research agencies, EPAM was one of only four technology companies to appear on Forbes 25 Fastest Growing Public Tech Companies list every year of publication since 2013 and was the only IT services company featured on Fortune’s 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list of 2019. Learn more at www.epam.com and follow us on Twitter @EPAMSYSTEMS and LinkedIn.

About Bacardi

Bacardi Limited, the largest privately held spirits company in the world, produces and markets internationally recognized spirits and wines. The Bacardi Limited brand portfolio comprises more than 200 brands and labels, including BACARDÍ® rum, GREY GOOSE® vodka, PATRÓN® tequila, DEWAR’S® Blended Scotch whisky, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® gin, MARTINI® vermouth and sparkling wines, CAZADORES® 100% blue agave tequila, and other leading and emerging brands including WILLIAM LAWSON’S® Scotch whisky, ST-GERMAIN® elderflower liqueur, and ERISTOFF® vodka. Founded more than 158 years ago in Santiago de Cuba, family-owned Bacardi Limited currently employs more than 7,000, operates production facilities in 11 countries, and sells its brands in more than 170 countries. Bacardi Limited refers to the Bacardi group of companies, including Bacardi International Limited. Visit www.bacardilimited.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. 

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes statements which may constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the accuracy of which are necessarily subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied include general economic conditions and the factors discussed in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. EPAM undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities law.