It’s no secret that migrating SAP workloads can be a complex, costly, and risky endeavor. With our partners Microsoft and Capgemini, we’ve made it our mission to change that by ensuring the largest and most data-intensive SAP migrations are simple, profitable, and completely risk free.
But what Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Inc. (CCBJI) needed was anything but typical. With 700,000 vending machines, 340,000 customer outlets, 11,000 trucks, and 600 SKUs across hundreds of thousands of products, CCBJI presides over a vast data estate amounting to 2500 terabytes (TB).
For perspective, it would take 500 years of nonstop HD video streaming to reach 2500 TB. This amount of data represents the scale and challenge of CCBJI’s SAP DB2 migration.
To say it was “big” would be an understatement. What Capgemini, Microsoft, and NetApp had taken on was nothing less than one of the largest SAP migration projects the world had ever seen.
Delivering happy moments at record-breaking speeds
“Our mission is to deliver happy moments while creating value for everyone,” says Maki Kado, Executive Officer of Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Inc. “It is extremely important that data is stable and supporting our business in a timely manner.”
Not just anyone could deliver on that mission. CCBJI needed partners with unparalleled SAP expertise to migrate from its traditional datacenter to a cloud service. Achieving this in a “timely manner” meant the migration had to be completed—not in a year or two—but within six months.
NetApp, Microsoft, and Capgemini were called into action. “We had to ensure that none of the actions we take have a negative impact on their operations and their sales and their bottom line,” said Daniel Stiegler, Senior Director of Cloud Infrastructure Services at Capgemini.
Ensuring operational continuity was not negotiable. Maintaining CCBJI’s high service standards without interruption would be the true measure of migration success.
Coca-Cola’s recipe is secret, but our formula for success is known worldwide
With 125 million customers on his mind, the Chief Information Officer of CCBJI, Harsh Kachhwaha knows that “downtime is very important”—in the sense that any interruption carried the potential to disrupt millions of transactions and hundreds of thousands of product displays daily.
“Using Azure NetApp Files, in one month we were able to see our total cost of ownership significantly reduced. Performance improved by 40%. Backup and recovery also improved by over 50%.”
– Harsh Kachhwaha, Chief Information Officer, Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Inc.
What CCBJI needed was what only NetApp technology integrated into Azure could provide. “Using Azure NetApp Files, in one month we were able to see our total cost of ownership significantly reduced,” happily reports Kachhwaha. “Delivery of services have come down from a few months or a few weeks to a few hours.” None of this would have been possible without the power of a first-party Azure storage solution.
As Stiegler explains, “Azure NetApp Files is the foundational storage services for SAP on Azure, consistently providing thousands of megabytes per minute and millions of IOPS. This kind of enterprise-grade storage performance is available only through Azure NetApp Files on Microsoft Azure.”
Getting data to the right place at the right time with zero downtime
With Azure NetApp Files, CCBJI successfully migrated one of the world’s largest SAP DB2 database to Azure in only five months, with zero impact on daily operations. But that’s not all CCBJI gained.
Benefits
- 50% faster cutover time
- 90% quicker failover time
- 40% boost in application response
- 30% savings in total costs in just one month
- 0% disruption in operations during the migration process
“With these faster systems,” explains Kachhwaha, “we are able to provide our customers the right product at the right time and the right place.” Business users are also able to complete critical data analyses faster to take advantage of growth opportunities in a market that’s expected to reach $938.8M (USD) by 20301.
“In terms of spending behavior and consumer preferences,” says Kado, “it’s even more crucial than ever that we have a very stable technology and databases that we can rely on to make big bets for the future.” Now that CCBJI runs SAP on Azure with Azure NetApp Files, those big bets are set to pay off with the confidence and operational efficiency of 99.99% guaranteed uptime.
When an SAP-to-Azure migration makes history, seeing truly is believing
For a global brand innovating at the intersection of tradition and technology, CCBJI’s record-breaking success proves what’s possible when industry-leading performance meets world-class partnerships.
See for yourself how Azure NetApp Files transformed an impossible migration into a success story, achieving measurable results that can drive the biggest businesses—and workloads—into the future.
Watch the power of partnership make cloud history
1 RationalStat, “New Market Study | Japan Vending Machine Market is Expected to Generate a Robust Revenue Share by 2030,” September, 2023.
