HPE U3F92E, U6A20E, U6G82E, U6H89E, U4993E Getting Started Guide

Case Study

ALPLA improves server
uptime and business continuity

Objective

Plan and execute a five-year
IT strategy to match global business
requirements, centralizing services,
improving server and email uptime
and establish new, state-of-the-art
data centers in two locations

Approach

Sought a supplier to provide a global
overview of its IT infrastructure. As a
long-time buyer of HPE servers, it sought
the advice from HPE Technology Servers

IT Matters

• Identified and prioritized 150
IT issues to be addressed, creating
proof-of-concepts for every step of
the transformation

• Created always-on access to global
email, improving communication and
speeding decision making

• Centralized global Microsoft® Exchange
server to reduce power, complexity and
management costs

• Removed local tape-based backup,
securing data storage with a
centralized system

• Modernized server fleet, increasing
availability meaning greater uptime
for business

Business Matters

• Created and executed a five-year
IT infrastructure strategy in line with
business requirements, securing
involvement of C-level management

• Consolidated supplier count, to
reduce management costs and
business complexity

by centralizing data centers

HPE Technology Services assesses the entire
business to develop a five-year IT strategy

ALPLA is possibly the
biggest company you’ve
never heard of. Its products
can be found in almost every
household in the developed
world and it generated sales
of €2.84 billion in 2011. Yet it
is hardly a household name.

Challenge

The need for a global overview

The Austrian plastics manufacturer produces
packaging solutions for the world’s biggest
Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands,
including Coca Cola, Unilever and P&G. From
bleach to motor oil, fabric conditioner to
ketchup, the chances are ALPLA designs and
manufactures the packaging. It has 148 factories
in 39 countries and continues to expand,
particularly in China and South America.

This global presence coupled with
increasingly close ties to its customers (many
of which have inhouse ALPLA manufacturing
facilities) presents several IT challenges.
The business has grown o the back of a
decentralized IT infrastructure, with local
data centers serving production and logistic
facilities all around the world. The result is an
infrastructure that is serviced by a mixed bag
of suppliers, inconsistent and hard to monitor.

Case study

ALPLA

Industry

Manufacturing

“There is greater availability of systems within the production and supply

chain and it is much easier to implement new services. It has matched the
IT function with the needs of the ALPLA organization.”

— Stefan Berchtold, corporate IT system engineer and project manager, ALPLA

Page 2

“Standardization is our biggest challenge,” says
Klaus P. Metzler, CIO and project sponsor, ALPLA.
“We needed to identify which services we could
centralize – in economic as well as performance
terms – and then consolidate.”

ALPLA’s Corporate IT Systems team of seven
(Stefan Berchtold, Matthias Fink, Johann
Foedeles, Christian Putz, Daniel Schrom,
Stefan Toeerl and Michael Wakolbinger) are
responsible for the company’s corporate IT
systems, including communication, security
and network services. With the infrastructure
hardware due for replacement (a previous IT
strategy was drawn up, inhouse, in 2003),
Berchtold says it was evident the business
needed to do more than just buy like-for-like
replacements, though he was unclear what
the new vision would look like: “There was an
opportunity to improve our servers and
services but who would be able to support
us in such a project?”

Needing an overview of all aspects of the
IT infrastructure, Berchtold realized he would
need to upgrade to a global rather than local
partner, ideally one with experience of similar
projects. Previously, local specialists served
each specialist function – email services,
network, Active Directory.

“We knew these wouldn’t have the scale to
create a global vision within the same time
frame,” says Berchtold. “That’s when we were
introduced to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”

HPE was a server supplier to the business,
but ALPLA was unaware of its consulting
services. Crucially, says Berchtold, HPE was
able to provide references. “It’s a huge
company with global presence – and it
had done a similar project with the Austrian
Embassies around the world. That we could
see this in action made us comfortable
allowing HPE to present its case.”

Solution

Workshops to clarify business objectives

To gain a complete view of ALPLA’s
requirements, HPE set about organizing
a series of workshops, establishing a
five-year IT strategy. “It wasn’t that we
were blind to the IT challenge,” says
Berchtold, “but HPE did a great job in
bringing us together as an organization.
The workshops involved SharePoint
services, business intelligence, ERP systems
– departments we hadn’t necessarily covered
in the past. And what did we find out? That
we all wanted the same things.”