Accenture Helps Carlsberg Transition to the Cloud as Part of its Strategy to Accelerate Growth and Improve Margins

Accenture has helped Carlsberg transition its information technology (IT) infrastructure to the public cloud as part of Carlsberg’s strategy to be an intelligent, digitally enabled and connected enterprise. The transition is providing Carlsberg with a modernized, dynamic and agile platform for its enterprise solutions, enabling digital innovation and helping the company gain more visibility into its IT operations.

This transformation — part of Carlsberg’s “SAIL ‘22” corporate strategy, which targets increased digital connectivity between the company and its customers, supply chain and employees — is setting the stage for a new era of growth and profitability at the leading brewery group and enhancing its ability to respond to market dynamics to capture greater market share.

Accenture and Avanade worked closely with Microsoft and SAP to help Carlsberg transition its core infrastructure and business-critical applications to the Microsoft Azure public cloud in less than six months. The transition covered more than 150 terabytes of data on 600 servers and 200 applications that serve more than 10,000 employees, including the whole SAP application suite.

Carlsberg is already reaping several business benefits, including improved stability of its IT system; a more agile and responsive IT infrastructure that enables the company to scale its resources up or down quickly as needed; and lower IT operating costs, freeing up capital that the company can invest elsewhere in the business.

The Azure platform enables Carlsberg and its partners to accelerate innovation by leveraging artificial intelligence, DevOps and analytics. For example, the brewery recently launched “Carrie,” a security chatbot solution developed by Avanade, through which employees can get 24/7 support for requests regarding security rules and regulations.

“Transitioning to the cloud is an important part of delivering against our ‘SAIL ‘22’ priorities, where our focus is to drive sustainable and profitable growth and brew for a better today and tomorrow,” said Mark Dajani, CIO and SVP of Global Business Services at Carlsberg Group. “In a highly dynamic and competitive industry, this provides a digital growth platform that enables us to deliver exceptional services and experiences of what we believe is the best beer in the world.

“We always pursue perfection, and the combination of Accenture’s experience in digital transformation services and industry knowledge and Avanade’s experience in implementing Microsoft technology has provided us with a leading-edge intelligent platform that is critical as we strive to become a truly digital business. Moving from a physical on-premise IT infrastructure to a managed public cloud environment is a big and challenging transition, and Accenture helped us do it quickly and as seamlessly as possible. In Accenture we have found a key partner that can deliver, innovate and respond rapidly, and they are just as passionate about this journey as we are.”

Henrik Pedersen, a managing director at Accenture, said, “With its journey to the cloud, Carlsberg is becoming a modern and digital enterprise, better positioned to take advantage of emerging technologies that enable them to quickly and easily innovate and launch new services and solutions for customers, business partners and employees. We’re delighted to have been able to play a key role in this exciting program that is helping make Carlsberg a digital leader in its industry.”