At a glance
Carlsberg A/S has a rich history of being passionate about its beer. As the maker of “probably the best beer in the world,” the company believes in brewing for a better today and tomorrow. Founded in 1847 and headquartered in Denmark, the multinational’s brews are available through export and license agreements in more than 150 markets worldwide. Its customers enjoy the brew as well: 2020 revenue was nearly $9 billion.
The brewing giant had been managing its IT infrastructure with a solution that didn’t provide the necessary visibility of the entire estate. By switching to Flexera’s IT Asset Management (ITAM) solution and partnering with SoftwareONE to operate its system, Carlsberg was able to realize substantial cost savings and increase efficiency.
The challenge
A costly lack of global IT and inventory visibility
As a leader in its industry, Carlsberg believes in the pursuit of “better.” But the company’s ITAM team faced several obstacles from a lack of visibility into its global IT assets, including challenges with planning, financial transparency and baseline, risk in legal compliance and incomplete entitlement data. Their previous system lacked procurement data, and the team struggled with SAP management. Inventory data covered only one-third of the global organization; Eastern Europe and Asia were complete blind spots. On top of this, the company’s budget process was time consuming and lengthy: most processes were manual, including license checks, software approvals and audit preparation.
The solution
Funnel data through Flexera’s ITAM solution
To combat these challenges, Carlsberg moved from a hybrid of on-premises inventory and Snow’s SAP solution to a fully Flexera-hosted ITAM solution. The company engaged SoftwareONE as a managed service provider to operate the system. Adding Flexera’s ITAM solution gave Carlsberg visibility across its entire global IT environment. The company’s main publisher’s contracts and licenses were imported into the solution, which was also integrated into ServiceNow. Carlsberg was finally able to see its inventory across its entire IT environment. Because of this increased visibility, customer requests could be processed quickly, increasing overall satisfaction.
Flexera gives me the necessary data quality to provide the financial transparency and overview required in a global software lifecycle management department.
Melanie Nash Senior Software Contract Manager, Carlsberg
The results
Optimize operations and realize significant cost savings
By deploying Flexera’s ITAM solution, Carlsberg realized substantial cost benefits and an increase in productivity and efficiency. Within the first year, the company saved over $400,000 through maintenance, running costs, support fees and license costs. Improved visibility across the brewer’s entire IT environment has improved renewals and contract negotiations and streamlined contracts.
Previously, Carlsberg had utilized six external resources to manage Western Europe alone. Now, with the help of Flexera, it was able to consolidate these external resources down to only two, which now manage Carlsberg’s entire global IT environment.
With visibility across its entire estate, Carlsberg was also able to avoid audit threats by consolidating its contracts into one global contract instead of several local ones. Global budget finalization is now streamlined, and administrative costs have decreased significantly.
Within the first year, Carlsberg
saved over
$400,000 in maintenance, running costs,
support fees and license costs
Cloud Cost Optimization gives us unprecedented insight into the state of our cloud spend so we can better leverage our AWS cloud investments.
Laurent Gaertner Director of Global Network and Hosting, Carlsberg Group
Optimizing AWS spend
The success of the initiative hasn’t gone unnoticed, and due to the explosive growth in AWS spend triggered by Carlsberg’s digital transformation initiatives, the brewery giant now needed a solution that would help implement FinOps best practices and ensure cloud spend was fully optimized. Carlsberg decided to further expand its investment into Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization to meet this challenge and ensure they were getting the most out of every cloud dollar they were spending with AWS. With full visibility into their cloud spend and attribution to every business unit, the company is now able to unlock optimization potential and have complete visibility, from on-premises, to SaaS and the cloud—all from a single dashboard.
About SoftwareONE
SoftwareONE helps clients govern and manage their software estate—be it licensing optimization, effective procurement, or deployment of cloud-based solutions. SoftwareONE works with clients of all sizes and across all geographies to manage their software, locally or remotely, at a data center or in a multi-cloud environment.
