SABMiller Improves Productivity with Higher Internet Speed

Do you know the reason for your weekend happiness, other than the beer in your hand? Well, it’s because the people manufacturing that bottle of beer do not mess up.

SABMiller is one such Indian beverage company that have been playing a vital role in giving you relaxed moments on weekend evenings.

But the CIO of the company wasn’t relaxed. The company’s establishments in remote areas had problems pertaining to WAN bandwidth after it planned to consolidate its IT Infrastructure.

SABMiller India, the second largest brewer in India and the world, has its offices, breweries, and depots spread over 30 locations in India. Rapid growth in the number of branches and applications on a multinational level called for an IT infrastructure consolidation. With this consolidation, there was an additional pressure on the WAN bandwidth with latency issues.

The company has establishments in remote areas that have very low bandwidth. Users in these areas experienced high latency during data transfer and frequently disconnected sessions. The application performance in these locations was very poor which led to low efficiency and productivity in addition to end-user frustration.

But the main area of concern was the delayed replication of domain controllers, active directory services, and application performance for mobile workers. Users complained about slow email and delays with the in-house applications. The company wanted a solution that would improve productivity for telecommuters.

Further complicating the situation was the fact that the company had multiple wide area network (WAN) operators connecting to its central datacenter in Bangalore. The company needed a single solution to optimize its WAN network to address issues related to connectivity and latency without increasing the bandwidth across various locations.

The IT-infrastructure and security team of the company decided to deploy a solution that would address the application performance issues across the WAN to deal with internal user and customer satisfaction challenges.

“The aim was to improve IT support requirements at 13 of the remote locations and reduce efforts in managing WAN and mail related issues,” says Ranendra K Datta, CIO, SABMiller India.

The team took cognizance of limited bandwidth capacity that could have slowed the performance. The company had to either opt for a WAN upgrade or implement a WAN optimization solution.

The team finally decided to deploy Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile software to scale WAN optimization.

With the required solution, the company successfully and intelligently implemented their strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performances.

“Looking at legacy and business expertise, Steelhead was the right choice for our business needs. The solutions offered were also cost viable and great from ROI perspective,” added Dutta.

After implementation of the solution, Dutta saw immediate and significant results for the company.

File transfers over the WAN were now 10 to 50 times faster—depending on file size, emails were ten times faster, and Web applications were 15 times faster with Steelhead products.

“The increase of speed and accessibility was very noticeable to our end users. A majority of our employees work with applications on terminal sessions, and they have experienced at least ten times improvement in speed. Mobile users reported a significant improvement in the performance, saying that with Steelhead there is a remarkable difference in the way it loads the pages,” concluded Datta.

With faster applications for users at the remote sites of the company, it is now easier for the company’s employees to work from anywhere.