–CIO, Large Food and Beverage
This Food & Beverage (F&B) Manufacturer was founded just before the turn of the 19th Century and manufactures, markets, and sells various foods, snacks, and carbonated and noncarbonated beverages to consumers in over 200 countries.
The Challenge
With over 285,000 employees, $60 billion in annual revenues, and 300 plants, offices, and warehouses, this F&B manufacturer truly understands that it has no-time for down-time. Known for its end-to-end 
supply chain, its foods unit manufacturers and markets various snacks foods and its beverages unit sells beverage concentrates, fountain syrups, and finished goods. In addition, the company distributes its products through direct-store-delivery, customer warehouse, and food service and vending distribution networks. As a result, their employees are involved in every aspect of their products’ production, from growing ingredients to the final delivery of products to the end-customer. For the last decade, their objective has been to make all divisions act together as a single company. To achieve the objective, the company has been involved in a multi-year SAP implementation and rollout. During the SAP rollout, the organization became concerned that their current HP Superdome environment would not be able to guarantee uptime. In addition, over the years, the company had amassed various types of software, hardware, and their accompanying costs and environmental impacts.
The Solution
With a desire to reduce costs, improve operations, and support green initiatives, the company turned to Clear Technologies to move from HP Superdomes to IBM’s award-winning System P 570 and Blades for the SAP environment. Clear was specifically chosen because of their expertise in multiple logical partitions (LPARs), each housing a separate operating system. “LPARs offer several advantages such as lower costs, faster deployment, and more convenience that safely allows combining multiple tests, development, quality assurance, and production work on the same system”, says Shari Cutler, Senior Consultant at Clear Technologies.
The results included lower ISV costs due to fewer but better performing processors, hardware maintenance costs due to newer hardware, and software maintenance charges due to less
processors needed. In addition, the organization was able to improve its operations due to its improved availability as additional processors were configured for high availability, utilization as more work can be done with less processors, and flexibility because of dynamic provisioning. Finally, the company was able to realize substantial green benefits that included reduced both power and cooling costs by 32%, and a decrease in floor space from 35 stand-alone servers to 5.
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