Anheuser-Busch InBev

Business Challenge Story

Integrating massive amounts of data post-acquisition

Following the acquisition of SAB Miller in October 2016, AB InBev was faced with the complex challenge of how to integrate vast amounts of data from multiple data centers in various regions. Data center migrations always present a significant amount of complexity, raising questions around how to integrate different production environments in a minimal amount of time. There is also a risk that data can be lost or only partially transferred during the migration.

As its global lead enterprise architect, Manu Boudewyn was looking for solutions that would help AB InBev with its major data center consolidation and relocation activities, covering hundreds of business-critical applications and petabytes of data.

“Data center and cloud migrations typically bring a variety of challenges and their complexity is often underestimated,” he says. “Besides the challenging network coexistence problems we typically encounter, technology architecture foundations are heterogeneous and both infrastructure and application service providers change during the migrations, which further amplifies the complexity.” 

In support of its industrialized and proven migration methodology, AB InBev required a proven solution for all of its tier 1 applications that could provide a sustainable, high-speed connection between data centers without causing business disruption, even when over 15 network devices from a variety of infrastructure providers are in the data path simultaneously supporting critical business transactions.

“In digital transformation, every second matters and business outages – especially for global companies – can be incredibly painful. Because of these challenges, we’ve always been architecting to ensure maximal business continuity, irrespective of the circumstances,” added Boudewyn.