Chobani grows a culture of innovation, fast business development by moving to SAP on Azure

An appetite for quality and innovation

Chobani began humbly in 2005 when founder Hamdi Ulukaya bought a shuttered yogurt plant in upstate New York. The US company started with five people and, in 2007, sold its first cup of Chobani Greek Yogurt to a tiny grocery store on New York’s Long Island.

Staying true to its mission of making delicious, accessible food, Chobani quickly developed a loyal following. By 2010, Chobani had grown from one man’s dream to America’s favorite Greek Yogurt. Today, Chobani is much more than a yogurt company. It produces oat milks, ready-to-drink cold brew coffee, plant-based and dairy coffee creamers, and oat-based probiotic drinks, while investing in communities and donating products to those in need. 

As the company rapidly grew, it acquired disparate technology tools to meet short-term needs. It operated as a startup and often moved ideas from concept to market in just six to eight months. “We couldn’t build IT infrastructure quickly enough to accommodate the fast pace of our business,” says Shahid Khan, Senior Director IT Infrastructure and Security at Chobani.

To integrate its IT systems and improve visibility and operational effectiveness, Chobani began a digital transformation process. “To take Chobani to the next level, we needed to move to the cloud,” says Parag Agrawal, Chief Information Officer at Chobani. “We wanted a simple, streamlined platform for both our front-end applications and our back-end systems.” 

Strategic consolidation of technologies 

First, the company evaluated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and decided to adopt SAP S/4HANA. Chobani wanted to run its ERP on a single global instance, starting with its North American business and eventually adding Australia. 

Next, Chobani needed to select the best cloud platform for its SAP environment. Agrawal and his team considered various options, but Microsoft Azure appealed most for its agility, pay-as-you-go cost structure, and easy interoperation with the company’s existing environment. The company already used Windows 10, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Office 365, and Azure Active Directory, and decision makers felt confident about working with Microsoft. “We needed infrastructure to fully support our SAP environment and we needed it quickly,” explains Agrawal. “We wanted to have a single-cloud strategy, and Azure made sense because we already used other Microsoft technologies.”

Adopting Azure fit with Chobani’s business objectives such as building true disaster recovery capabilities, supporting SAP analytics without impacting production servers, and improving productivity. ”We wanted to be as modern as possible as we took this big step, and Azure was the obvious choice for us,” says Agrawal. “Using it would help us ensure that we’d be making a business transformation, not just a technology transformation.”

Lastly, having decided to run SAP on Azure, Chobani set out to deploy SAP S/4HANA, SAP Process Orchestration, SAP Document Service, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), and SAP Business Object Data Services on Azure. By December 2020, the company had finished that implementation and migrated all its non-SAP workloads and applications from its on-premises facilities to Azure.

High availability, real-time reporting

Chobani’s digital transformation goals included high availability and fast, efficient disaster recovery. The company also wanted access to real-time operational analytics directly from SAP S/4HANA. Chobani worked with partner Khoj Information Technology, an SAP Silver partner and Microsoft Gold Partner, to accomplish these goals. “We chose Khoj Information Technology as a partner because they had the agility to really support our vision,” states Agrawal.

Khoj helped Chobani implement SAP S/4HANA on Azure using active-active, high availability configurations. The joint team used SUSE Pacemaker Clusters and fencing API to help maintain service availability in the event of a failure. With an SAP HANA active-active setup, the company can produce live reports directly from S/4 without any performance impact to its production system. Chobani adopted Azure Load Balancer to help deliver high availability and strong network performance. The company also implemented Azure Site Recovery and HANA System Replication solutions to deliver best-in-class recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.

“Running SAP S/4HANA active-active on Azure has definitely boosted our availability, and we aim to get to near-zero downtime maintenance,” says Khan. “Now that our reporting provides up-to-date details into inventory and production levels and other variable information, the business can respond faster to market conditions and make data-driven decisions."

Using Azure Site Recovery and HANA System Replication, Khoj helped Chobani test the reliability and availability of the company’s SAP environment on Azure. “We performed a very successful disaster recovery exercise and beat industry benchmarks for recovery point and recovery time objectives thanks to Azure Site Recovery,” explains Ajay Dhingra, Founder and President of Khoj Information Technology. “Chobani runs an extensive high-availability architecture and now has incredible resiliency with the reliability of Azure infrastructure.”

Increased business velocity and agility

By moving to Azure, Chobani can easily spin up the SAP S/4HANA instances it needs without upfront costs. The company has the flexibility to maintain its fast pace of business because it can test application performance and scale up or down before committing to a long-term arrangement. By spinning up virtual machines for disaster recovery testing and then removing them after the test, Chobani saves any costs of added hardware. The company also continues to prepare for the future by exploring AI, machine learning, and Azure Logic Apps. “With Azure, we have the agility to spontaneously scale up as needed and make sure that infrastructure never becomes a bottleneck,” states Agrawal.

Adds Khan, “We became more nimble and agile with Azure. We can build whatever we need without overbuilding. By running SAP on Azure, we’ve cleared away any IT infrastructure roadblocks. We can grow and scale up or down our infrastructure to support new business initiatives at a pace that we couldn’t possibly have achieved before.” 

Ultimately, Chobani doesn’t want technology to get in the way of business innovation. Agrawal concludes, “We want to produce delicious, nutritious food without worrying about the software. By choosing SAP on Azure, we gain best-in-breed capabilities while focusing on our customers.” 

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