India’s United Breweries processes backend jobs ~50% faster

11 January, 2018
Venkatraman Umakanth
IBM

Does your organization need a tailored data center infrastructure for SAP HANA? Are you facing a growing volume of data that your existing IT infrastructure isn’t equipped to handle? In today’s fast-paced digital world, companies need an infrastructure that’s optimized for faster business processes and insights.

United Breweries Limited (UBL) has been a market leader in the beer business in India with over 50% market share. It has a portfolio of winning brands, including its flagship brand, Kingfisher, which is synonymous with “beer” in India. The company operates in a very complex regulatory environment and has a network of 30 breweries across the country to meet the market demand.

As its volume of data exploded, there was considerable slowdown in backend job processing, and its IT leaders were enthusiastic about exploring a solution with SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems.

Many organizations today are confronting similar challenges. The volume of their business data is growing intensely, posing challenges for aging infrastructure and storage capabilities. In this IT environment, companies need smart, innovative IT infrastructure solutions that are designed for cognitive business.

Working with trusted partners on the journey

United Breweries, founded in 1857, is part of the UB Group. It is a major player in the alcoholic beverages industry in India. IBM has worked closely with United Breweries for many years to help further this mission by providing IT infrastructure support.

UBL has been a pioneer in the use of technology solutions over the years, and keeping with that trend, it was one of the early adopters of HANA solutions from SAP. IBM and SAP have partnered with United Breweries since 2012 when it adopted SAP HANA as an appliance on x86 architecture. Over the years, its data volume had grown and the existing appliance couldn’t cater to the load and needed to be upgraded. At the same time, the other components and workloads of UBL’s SAP solution were also on the verge of becoming a challenge. The client was looking for a high-performance platform capable of faster data analysis. To solve the challenge, the company approached IBM.

SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems for faster insights and business processes

Like many companies with a growing volume of data, United Breweries had found it increasingly difficult to adhere to business needs, as backend jobs were taking longer than expected. By migrating its SAP HANA database to the latest IBM Power Systems servers, the company dramatically accelerated the processing time of backend jobs.

Through the solution that IBM Systems Lab Services designed, United Breweries adopted IBM Power Systems server technology, IBM PowerVM for server virtualization and IBM Storewize to maximize storage efficiency.

Moving its SAP HANA database to the IBM Power Systems platform offered the Indian beer company a significant advantage in the time it took to run backend jobs. It also helped resolve the potential challenges with other SAP components and workloads. Not only that, working with Lab Services Power Systems meant that United Breweries had support from consultants with proven expertise on designing and delivering solutions just like this one.

Benefits for United Breweries

What are the benefits of this SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems solution for United Breweries?

The key advantage was faster backend data extraction jobs processing. United Breweries saw 50 percent improvement in processing time of backend jobs. In addition, the SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems solution provided:

  • Flexibility and cost economics
  • A robust Power Systems architecture with superior processor, memory and I/O performance
  • Enterprise-grade virtualisation that can support mission-critical workloads

Check out this video to learn more:

IBM Systems Lab Services has a wealth of experience on SAP HANA for IBM Power Systems projects. Reach out to us today if we can support your next IT infrastructure solution.

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