The merger of Keurig Green Mountain with Dr Pepper Snapple Group created the third largest beverage company in North America. The combined $11.5 billion entity, renamed Keurig Dr Pepper, also resulted in a massive and complex IT and business ecosystem, leading to support bottlenecks due to a heterogeneous IT landscape that completely lacked any modernization. A chaotic mix of homegrown custom applications was spread across poorly managed servers with high operations costs and a lack of agility. With servers that were over 20 years old, the system suffered from poor data archival policies, limited CPU power and memory running on an older OS version.

The client needed a partner with the technological expertise and experience to help drive digital and infrastructure transformation across the entire organization, including facilitating simplification, flexibility and cost reduction for its IT architecture. This included helping them with a data center combined with a vendor consolidation strategy as well as providing end-to-end managed services which included new ways to manage infrastructure, applications and guiding principles for cloud operations.

The first step the HCLTech team embarked on was a careful analysis to uncover key problem areas. The merger had led to an increase in demand, and the existing IT landscape was ill-equipped to service the requirement. The HCLTech team recognized the need for transformation in the client’s digital infrastructure and executed all the elements of the 6R application treatment model—Re-host, Re-platform, Re-purchase, Re-factor, Retire and Retain.

A hybrid and multi-cloud architecture was deployed with an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) based deployment methodology including establishing workload distribution and customer priorities using the Google Cloud Platform for SAP and Microsoft Azure for non-SAP workloads.

An extensive exercise, the project covered as many as 320+ SAP servers, 1,450+ non-SAP servers, 168 business applications and 20 infrastructure applications. It also encompassed 126 database instances, seven data centers, four cloud regions as 100TB of usable storage.

The new framework enabled a scalable operating model that integrated the legacy IT systems of both Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and also created a simpler and faster ‘Platform for the Future.’

The vast deployment included 14 migrations in 14 weeks with less than one defect per migration. With the new hybrid cloud architecture and technology standardization in infrastructure and applications, Keurig Dr Pepper enjoyed the benefits of improved 14 migrations in 14 weeks with less than one defect per migration momentum and agility. The speed enabled by the exercise was immediately visible with a 2-millisecond hybrid cloud latency for Oracle workloads. Moreover, it led to a substantial business benefit of a 40% reduction in the operating costs of its IT architecture.