Asahi Group Holdings: Modernizing Legacy Systems with Google Cloud

Asahi Group Holdings, Ltd., founded on 1 September, 1949, is a global corporation that engages in the manufacture and sale of food and beverages. It operates through various segments, including alcoholic beverages, soft drinks, food, logistics, and other businesses. The company is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Asahi Group is renowned for making some of the world's well-known Japanese beers and prides itself on adopting a 'glocal' mindset with innovation ingrained deep in their DNA. As part of their growth strategy, the company is focused on creating 'a winning Asahi' by modernizing their legacy systems.

Asahi Group Holdings, a global corporation with a diverse portfolio in food and beverages, was facing challenges with its legacy systems. Back in 2014, the company lacked the necessary environment and tools to carry out its vision, which was affecting daily operations. The IT department was becoming a cost center, with the team focused on updating tools daily. As part of their growth strategy and mission of creating “a winning Asahi”, the company needed to modernize its business systems. Extending the life of existing assets and moving to a new environment became a priority. However, the company had limited resources to achieve this.

Asahi Group Holdings found its solution in Google Cloud. The company was introduced to BigQuery during 'Google Cloud Next '17 in Tokyo' held in June 2017. Based on the initial results from cloud utilization, Asahi Group introduced Apigee API Management in the latter half of 2017 to 2018, to further accelerate their digital transformation. The company is gradually transforming legacy systems into a fully modern architecture by adopting Google Cloud VMware Engine, a solution that provides a fully integrated VMware vSphere environment natively in Google Cloud. This solution enables customers to rapidly migrate VMware workloads to Google Cloud without changes and take advantage of a highly performant, modern, scalable infrastructure. The actual switch will begin in June 2022 and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

• The modernization of Asahi Group's business systems with Google Cloud has led to significant operational improvements. The company has been able to reduce bottlenecks in its hub systems, thereby increasing productivity. The migration of systems to Google Cloud VMware Engine was achieved in a short time, freeing up the IT teams from mundane tasks and allowing them to focus more on business solutions. The company is also able to crunch through massive amounts of company data with BigQuery, leading to better business results. The transition to the new system is expected to be so natural that users will not be affected.

• Reduced bottleneck in its hub systems, increasing productivity

• Migrated systems to Google Cloud VMware Engine in a short time

• Frees up IT teams from mundane tasks to focus more on business solutions