PepsiCo Scales Hybrid Infrastructure and Edge AI with SUSE

Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo:
To better understand how the architects for resilience at scale, please join me in welcoming to the stage Chris Scott, Director of Global Compute and Database Services at PepsiCo. How are you?

Chris Scott:
I'm doing great. Thank you.

Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo:
So we talked about resilience as the ability to maintain uptime, but not only that, for driving innovation as well. PepsiCo, you migrated recently countless systems from a legacy solution to standardize on SUSE across clouds, and you streamlined your technology platform accordingly. How did that move actually enabled your team to stop playing defense and focusing more on your business demands?

Chris Scott:
So thank you, Dr. T. It's truly a pleasure to be here today. I traveled to SUSECON 26 from Plano, Texas, and I'm genuinely excited to talk about what we've discovered and accomplished through our collaboration with SUSE.

For us, resilience isn't just about surviving disruption. It's about creating the conditions to generate innovation. When we were managing multitudes of legacy systems, every day felt like playing defense. The complexity, the fragmentation, the technical debt — it consumed time, talent, and attention that should have been going towards new business value.

By standardizing on SUSE across clouds and consolidating into a consistent enterprise platform, we essentially cleared the archaeological layers of technical debt that had built up over decades. Suddenly, our teams weren't spending their energy firefighting or navigating one-off exceptions. They were working from a modern, predictable, and automated foundation.

That shift changed everything. Instead of asking, “How do we keep this whole thing alive another year?” we could ask, “What's the next capability the business needs? How do we accelerate our data center transformation projects like SkyBridge? How do we support AI-driven operations? Or how do we deliver new services faster?”

Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo:
That's an important question to ask yourself, actually.

Chris Scott:
So for us, the move away from legacy sprawl gave us back our most valuable resource. That's capacity. Capacity to innovate, to partner with the business, to experiment, to build for the future. That's the real story. Resilience isn't just uptime. It's the ability to move quickly, confidently, and repeatedly towards what's next.

Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo:
And there's a lot of things that are next, actually. You're a food and drinks powerhouse with Global Operation. So I would think that SAP is at the heart of your operation. And having a scalable, consistent foundation with SUSE, how does it ensure that you can actually stay resilient with that core business, even as you embrace complex hybrid cloud architecture, as we've seen?

Chris Scott:
So for a company with a global footprint of PepsiCo, SAP isn't just another system. It's an operational heartbeat of our supply chain, our manufacturing, our finance, and our customer commitments. That means the foundation underneath SAP has to be rock solid, scalable, and consistent no matter where it runs.

Standardizing on SUSE Linux, SUSE Multi-Linux support, and SUSE Multi-Linux Manager gave us exactly that unified operating model across data centers, clouds, regions. Instead of managing dozens of variations, exceptions, and one-off configurations, we now operate from a single, predictable baseline. That consistency is what makes resilience real.

Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo:
So talking about new things, I've seen actually what you've done in the factories with AI-driven quality control. Very impressive. How did the stack that we built together help you bridge the gap between data centers and the edge at your production lines?

Chris Scott:
So one of the most exciting outcomes of our modernization is how it's unlocked AI-driven quality control at the edge of our manufacturing lines. So historically, the edge was disconnected. There was different hardware, different operating models, different security postures. It made it difficult to deploy cloud-native innovation, where it could have been giving us the biggest impact, right where the products are made.

So by building our stack on SUSE Edge, we finally bridged that gap. Rancher gave us a consistent Kubernetes operating model from the data center to the cloud to the factory floor. Suddenly, deploying AI workloads at the edge wasn't a bespoke engineering effort. It became a repeatable, governed, secure process for us.

That consistency is what made the leap possible. The same containerized models we trained in the cloud can now run reliably on ruggedized edge clusters sitting next to the production line. So updates, patches, new model versions, it all flows through the same pipeline. And because Rancher gives us centralized visibility and lifecycle management, we can operate hundreds of edge locations with the same confidence we have in our core data centers.

So the results are transformative. Our AI models that detect defects in real time, we improve yields, we reduce waste, we enhance safety, and it's all running at the edge, all managed through a unified platform. So SUSE helped us turn what used to be a fragmented landscape into a seamless continuum from cloud to data center to production line. That's how we're scaling AI and manufacturing, not in isolated pilots, but as an enterprise capability.

Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo:
That's really cool. I think what you and the PepsiCo team have achieved is really setting the gold standard for the industry in terms of what we mean by resilience. You're proven that when you eliminate technical debts, you can actually accelerate, create a consistent foundation, and you gain the freedom to move that we were discussing about, for cutting-edge technologies to support your business. Thank you for sharing how PepsiCo is shaping a more resilient, innovative, driven future. Thank you very much, Chris.

Chris Scott:
Thank you, Dr. T. Good day.