Hershey is a brand that we can all embrace, but chocolate and theme parks are only part of the business. So when the company’s CEO articulates in public that he considers Hershey to be a knowledge and insight company — that just happens to make chocolate — it is critical to choose the right partners to realize that vision.

Carlos Amesquita, CIO at The Hershey Co.; Henrik Wagner, global SAP Alliance Lead at Virtustream, Inc.; and Clay Caldwell, national VP, Americas, HANA Enterprise Cloud at SAP SE, met with Peter Burris (@plburris), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the recent SAP Sapphire 2016 event to discuss Hershey’s technological transformation.

Transforming a company

Amesquita told theCUBE that Hershey is a customer-centric, consumer-focused, branded company that depends on deep insights about what the consumers want, what they need and how to get it to them at the time they want it.

“That in itself is a tall order for any IT organization,” he said. However, when he joined the company with a mandate to create a leading analytics company, he explained that a change to the company’s entire platform of systems for speed and for delivering those insights was necessary.

Transformation partners

Burris remarked to Amesquita that Hershey has a history of good customer and employee engagement. Why did you choose to work with SAP and Virtustream?” he asked?

Noting the substantial technology shift combined with cloud and analytics, Amesquita remarked,” At some point you need to change from were you are and where you want to be.” He carefully picked who would lead the change and established a very strong partnership with the leadership of both SAP and Hershey. “So it’s not only about a contract or implementation; it is about a strategic long-term partnership,” he added.

Virtustream comes into the picture as a systems integrator, and the company is a key component to helping Hershey achieve its plans. Amesquita chose Virtustream because he believes in virtualization in the long-term and feels it is a necessity to power the company’s transformation.

Continuing the transformation

Wagner told Burris how Virtustream is excited to be working with SAP and around S/4HANA Cloud to drive innovation for Hershey. “We have an extremely large focus going into the project … coming from our leadership down,” he said. “Being there in the beginning of the project, as we are kicking it off now, all the way through the journey, we feel humbled to be part of it.”

Caldwell pointed out that the Hershey, SAP, Virtustream partnership has been ongoing for the past six months. “With Hershey dipping their big toe in the water with a mission-critical enterprise application and business warehouse putting that in our HANA Enterprise Cloud with Virtustream … they are now moving forward the totality of their environment onto HANA Enterprise Cloud,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE