TCS to help UK’s Co-operative Group move its IT systems to the cloud

India’s largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has expanded its partnership with Co-operative Group (Co-op), United Kingdom's largest consumer co-operatives to help the latter adopt cloud-first strategy to reduce its carbon footprint and support business growth, the company said on Wednesday.

Owned by more than eight-million members, Co-op is the UK’s fifth-biggest food retailer. They operate 13 distribution centres and more than 2,600 stores, and deal with 55,000 products and 1,700 wholesale customers.

TCS has been the strategic partner to Co-op for the past 14 years, supporting a number of business-critical and workplace transformations. These include their retail business transformation, core system transformation and franchise programme. These initiatives have helped Co-op accelerate time to market, create new revenue streams, and enhance agility to respond in real time to emerging business scenarios.

The expanded partnership will see TCS help Co-op move from a traditional data centre model to a fully managed, scalable cloud environment powered by TCS Enterprise Cloud.

TCS said that this migration to a scalable cloud will help Co-op by enabling a foundation for future capabilities and growth, while reducing energy usage and supporting sustainability goals. TCS will also manage the hybrid cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) estate for enhanced resilience and agility.

“We are delighted to extend our strategic partnership with TCS in enabling us to meet Co-op’s business objectives and serving and supporting our member-owners who are at the very heart of our business,” said Rob Elsey, CDIO of Co-operative Group.

“They have been a great partner, aligned with our growth priorities and future-proofed our infrastructure as we set on the course for continued future expansion — supporting change and transformation in how we work as a business and in our cloud journey.” 

Shekar Krishnan, head, retail & CPG — UK & Europe at TCS, said, “Our contextual knowledge, deep domain expertise, and technology prowess will help Co-op achieve their cloud-first strategy and result in a resilient digital foundation to support their business growth.”

TCS is one of the largest providers of IT services, consulting, and business solutions in the UK by revenue. It has operated in the region for more than 45 years and works with over 200 of the nation’s best-known businesses. It currently employs more than 23,000 people in the UK and Ireland, making it among the region’s biggest IT employers.