When you visit New Belgium Brewing Company, the aromas make it easy to anticipate the taste that awaits you in a sample glass of beer. And standing beside the massive vats and kettles, you get a true sense of the hard work required to provide that taste. However, you may not understand the important role IT plays in helping to deliver that world-class beer.
New Belgium Brewing’s IT Director, Trevor Morrison and his incredibly talented IT team supports the 4th largest craft brewer in the US, while expanding operations on a global scale. According to Morrison, the company’s employees are a unique set of folks with a passion for brewing and a strong commitment to New Belgium’s business model of sustainability and social responsibility.
In the highly competitive craft beer landscape, improving efficiency and achieving cost savings are key for success. New Belgium constantly looks for ways to make better use of materials, reduce energy consumption and minimize its impact on the environment. IT plays an essential role in every phase of beer making, from procuring the raw materials and maintaining exceptional quality control, to marketing and managing the business.
As New Belgium’s business was expanding, they jumped on the bandwagon with a cloud service provider to help manage their growing IT requirements. As they expanded their operations and added a new brewing facility, New Belgium realized that a high-performance, on-premises solution would be much more efficient. Going through a third-party took more time for upgrades and management, and the New Belgium team found they could do the work themselves much faster without paying for services they didn’t need. As a result, the company moved their core business applications back on site while relying on the public cloud for less critical applications with Office 365.
New Belgium chose Dell EMC PowerEdge servers as the underlying infrastructure to provide the foundation for the brewing process, handling everything from tweaking recipes, opening and closing valves, and managing temperatures. PowerEdge servers also support the increasing requirements for applications and data, allowing the team to achieve greater control over data integrity and security while improving application speed and reducing IT costs. The company runs sophisticated workloads, such as ERP and CRM systems, SQL databases, SharePoint, and Skype for Business for general operations and to support their growing need for data analytics.
New Belgium’s on-premise servers and time-saving management tools—including Dell EMC OpenManage and iDRAC—have also cut costs substantially compared to an off-site public cloud facility.
With the on-premise solution, New Belgium has:
- Lowered annual operational costs by 66%
- Reduced provisioning time by 90%
- Improved support ticket resolutions by 80%
As the craft beer marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, New Belgium Brewing continues to evolve while leveraging technology to develop world-class craft beers and meet market demand in the most efficient and effective way. Read our new case study to see how we helped them to make it happen.
Make plans to join us at Dell Technologies World 2019 and meet the New Belgium Team in person! We’ll be hosting an exclusive New Belgium Brewing Happy Hour every afternoon from the show floor in the PowerEdge booth. Follow @DellEMCservers to stay in the loop.
