Chobani Case Study

Leading American food maker Chobani has an appetite for quality and innovation. With their rapid growth came the need for a nimble IT environment to keep up with future large-scale requirements.

To fill this gap, the company chose to implement SAP S/4HANA and other SAP applications on Microsoft Azure, with assistance from its current support partner Khoj Information Technology. Chobani continues to leverage the latest technologies like SUSE Pacemaker Clusters and Azure Site Recovery. The company now has a unified environment, better uptime, and instant scaling.

Chobani went from a five-member company selling Greek Yogurt on New York’s Long Island in 2007 to America’s favorite Greek Yogurt in 2010. Today, the company produces oat milk and plant-based and dairy coffee creamers, among a range of other edibles. And alongside scaling the business, the company continues to invest in underprivileged communities and make relevant donations to the needy.

At one point, to cope with the rapid growth, Chobani acquired disparate technology tools to meet short-term needs. The company began operating as a startup wherein it moved ideas from concept to market in just six to eight months. However, despite these short-term successes, the company found it incredibly challenging to accommodate the scalability of its business with the existing infrastructure in place.

“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 needed a digital transformation process. And finally, the need for a simple streamlined application to support both their back-end and front-end systems was realized.

“To take Chobani to the next level, we needed to move to the cloud,” says Parag Agrawal, Chief Information Officer at Chobani.

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

Chobani required high availability with fast and efficient disaster recovery. The company also wanted access to real-time operational analytics. To accomplish these lofty goals, Chobani worked with partner Khoj Information Technology, an SAP Silver Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner.

“We chose Khoj Information Technology as a partner because they had the agility to really support our vision,” states Agrawal.

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 was already using Windows 10, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Office 365, and Azure Active Directory at the time, and so, the decision-makers felt confident about working with Microsoft.

“We needed infrastructure to fully support our SAP environment and we needed it quickly. We wanted to have a single-cloud strategy, and Azure made sense because we already used other Microsoft technologies,” explains Agarwal.

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 could now produce live reports directly from S/4 without any performance impact on 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.

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,” says 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.”

By moving to Azure, Chobani can today 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.

“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,” explained Khan.