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In order to quickly respond to market opportunities, Barry Callebaut is gathering its worldwide fleet of servers into a single environment. As partner, Telindus Belgacom ICT will be making Barry Callebaut’s information technology and telecoms available anywhere, anyhow and anytime.

Over the years, Barry Callebaut has grown into a world-class player. This growth has led to a highly heterogeneous, decentrally organized ICT-environment, scattered throughout forty production sites and seven sales offices. In an initial step, Barry Callebaut standardized the fleet of PCs and servers, and brought some structure to the applications for the end users. Still, the ICT remained fundamentally a decentralized entity: each location had its own servers and its own datacenter. ”Since the company keeps on growing, the situation was becoming too difficult to manage,” recalls Kris Vandaele, Corporate IT Manager at Barry Callebaut. “Even in the current economic climate, opportunities do arise, but they vanish just as quickly. In order to be able to respond to that, you need ICT-support that is agile.” Barry Callebaut investigated what might offer the best solution for the company. That turned out to be a centralized environment, to start with. “We are facing quite a challenge,” points out Kris Vandaele. “We’re talking about bringing together 428 servers, distributed all over the world, into a single platform.”

Barry Callebaut decided to work with Telindus Belgacom ICT for the project. “We had already had a positive experience with Telindus. We wanted an integrator who could act as a partner, and not just as a supplier.” An earlier project involving VoIP in China that Telindus had carried out very smoothly and successfully for Barry Callebaut - despite the great language barrier and cultural differences - was part of what clinched it. “They demonstrated to us there that they are a true integrator: a partner who can act independently of suppliers as the extended ICT-organization for the client.” Telindus studied the existing situation and investigated the business impact of the project. “That made it possible for us to present our plans to the business in the right way from the get-go.” Currently, the company is working on the technical segment of the process. This will be followed in the first quarter of 2010 by an extensive test phase for the design at a production site as well as at a commercial location. If the tests produce the desired results, then we can get started with the roll-out. The entire centralization transition should be completed by late 2012.

Flexible ICT

“It’s a far-reaching project,” says Kris Vandaele. “After all, it is a question of an environment to which four thousand workstations are connected. What’s more, the time-span for the project is fairly short.” Barry Callebaut is currently researching whether the IT-organization will be able to handle the project with its own staff. There is also a possibility that the company could turn to Telindus for extra staffing. “An additional challenge is that we absolutely have to stay within our budget.” Right now, with the development of a new WAN, Barry Callebaut has already laid the basis for the centralization. “We are starting with the consolidation of the fileserver storage on IBM-technology.” No surprise there, since IBM is also hosting partner for Barry Callebaut’s SAP-systems which are housed in the Belgacom Netcenters. In the first place, Barry Callebaut will be consolidating and centralizing the server fleet in two redundant datacenters in Wieze. “Through this project we want to make the company’s ICT-environment more flexible, in order to react more quickly to the market,” continues Kris Vandaele. “At the same time, we are gaining advantages in the area of cost reduction and cost elimination. Moreover, we will be able to organize the management better, which is important in terms of compliance.”

Company profile

Barry Callebaut is the global leader in the production of cocoa and chocolate products. The site in Wieze is the largest chocolate factory in the world. Barry Callebaut employs a workforce of 7,000 and has a turnover of 3.1 billion euros.

Business benefits

- centrally managed ICT-environment for more flexibility and service to the business, enabling it to respond more rapidly to market opportunities. “The Agile Enterprise”

- standardization, consolidation and virtualization lead to cost reduction and cost elimination

- better management in terms of compliance towards backup, security and disaster recovery.

Want to know more ?

For more information on this solution, visit the Belgacom website or contact your Account Manager.