Brewing Company – Cognizant

Client is one of the world’s top alcoholic beverages companies with a diversified portfolio of market-leading brands across various categories of spirits, beer, and wine. The company operates in over 72 countries and is driven by a relentless focus on ensuring customer delight and maximizing shareholder value by creating innovative products.

To meet its strategic objectives of rapid global expansion and long term profitability, the company was exploring means to fuel product innovation and reduce the time to market for new business initiatives, all while containing costs. The company’s enterprise users, across the globe, sought enhanced infrastructure management services, with extensive service desk support. Despite its rapidly growing operations, only about thirty percent of the organization’s IT setup had undergone virtualization, with the underlying SAP system running on almost a decade old hardware – a serious impediment to business agility.

Following a market benchmarking exercise, the company realized their potential to optimize its current IT infrastructure management spends, and set itself a target of reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) by about fifty percent. The company sought Akvarr’s support for revamping its IT infrastructure management while maintaining costs, but without compromising on the quality and consistency of end user experience. Akvarr had to engineer a smooth transition to the future-state service model within eight months, while ensuring zero business disruption. To address the company’s key organizational objectives, we adopted the service integration and management (SIAM) approach, complaint with the ITIL framework for IT service management. Akvarr also helped the company enhance end user experience by implementing a scalable IS platform that transformed the company’s data centers, end user computing (EUC) services, and IT service desk.

The company realized results in three key areas:

• Data center migration: Akvarr facilitated the transition of the underlying SAP estate from HP’s UNIX operating system to IBM’s AIX. Overall, more than 1,200 servers, 170 databases, over 500 terabytes of storage, and 4,000 terabytes of backup data were handled in the data center migration exercise.
• End user computing services (EUCs): Keeping in mind the company’s aim of supporting end users’ devices worldwide, and transitioning compute support services, we teamed up with its global partners to offer desk side support. We also implemented access management, and migration of data from the organizational premises to cloud, for over 30,000 enterprise users.
• IT service desk: The rollout of the IT service desk covered more than 26,000 end users across 360 sites in 72 countries, and facilitated multiple channels of communication including voice, chat, email, and self-service portal.