Interactive keeps UCC Coffee’s systems percolating through Azure migration

Melbourne, Australia - 16 June 2026:  Interactive, one of Australia's leading IT service providers, has partnered with UCC Coffee to deliver a major cloud transformation, migrating the company's on-premises server environment to Microsoft Azure.

For UCC Coffee, keeping Australia's cafés, convenience stores, quick-service restaurants and offices supplied with the best beans and blends is a business where timing matters. So, when a significant portion of UCC Coffee's server environment began nearing the end of its support cycle, and rising costs made its existing on-premises private cloud environment harder to justify, the company knew it was time for a technology reset to power its growth and operations.

To solve this brief, leading Australian IT services provider Interactive partnered with UCC Coffee to deliver a major hybrid cloud transformation, migrating key workloads from its on-premises server environment to Microsoft Azure while keeping heavier back-end systems on private cloud where it made more commercial and operational sense.

UCC Coffee is one of Australia and New Zealand's largest coffee suppliers, serving cafés, convenience stores, quick-service restaurants and offices across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. For UCC Coffee IT Manager ANZ, Greg Wratt, the brief was simple but high stakes: modernise the environment without interrupting the flow of business.

"If our system was to go down, the business goes down… and it's $1,000,000 a day if it goes down," said Wratt.

The pressure was brewing on several fronts. Ageing servers needed attention, platform costs were rising, and UCC Coffee's lean IT team needed a partner that could manage the complexity without disruption to day-to-day operations.

To meet the requirements of this brief, Interactive recommended a pragmatic hybrid cloud model rather than a one-size-fits-all migration, moving front-end workloads to Microsoft Azure to give UCC Coffee the scalability, flexibility and cost benefits of public cloud. Heavier back-end systems remained on private cloud, avoiding unnecessary complexity and ensuring workloads were placed in the right environment for performance and reliability.

Interactive also secured Microsoft funding that offset a substantial portion of the project's migration and modernisation costs.

Once the commercial framework was agreed, Interactive managed the migration end-to-end, prebuilding servers, scheduling overnight cutovers and handling the technical heavy lifting behind the scenes.

"Downtime isn't an option in our business, and the seamlessness of the deployment and transition meant our supply to our major customers and local cafés was able to continue without interruption. It was a good sign that no one noticed anything change overnight - if anything, we were working better and faster," said Wratt.

The new environment is also helping UCC Coffee move faster as the business grows. Through a more modern and scalable foundation, UCC can now simply add new sites. Wratt can now activate and launch a new location via a single email to the Interactive team, including getting connectivity in place within hours.

The project has already delivered cost, performance and resilience improvements, with the move of front-end workloads to Azure generating an approximate 40% reduction in monthly costs, while the broader program brought UCC Coffee's server estate onto modern, fully supported operating systems; work that had been waiting in the queue for several years.

Interactive also introduced a new security operations capability as part of the project, strengthening UCC Coffee's protection and risk management across its ANZ environment, with broader benefits achieved for the global group.

"We would be completely lost without Interactive. 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," said Wratt.

Ivan Kovacevic, Interactive Account Executive and UCC client lead said the project showed the value of taking a practical approach to cloud transformation, particularly for organisations where downtime is more than an IT inconvenience.

"UCC Coffee came to us with a challenge. We're proud that from the outside, our work made it look like nothing changed. Internally, everything did. That's the measure of a successful migration", said Kovacevic. While the upgrades and underlying infrastructure changes were significant, the transition was seamless.

For UCC Coffee, the result is a fresh technology foundation with more room to grow - and one less thing standing between its customers and their next cup.

ENDS