Playing partners off against each other

Image:

Using both AWS and Microsoft Azure meant BAT could foster “competitive tension” to get the best deal

British American Tobacco’s Javed Iqbal turned cloud competition into cost savings.

Most new businesses today are cloud-first, if not cloud-only, but that’s a modern development. Established companies are dragging around long tails of legacy tech, tripping them up as they try to match their younger competitors’ speed and agility.

British American Tobacco, established in 1902, had a longer tail than most, but director of digital and information Javed Iqbal has managed to carve it down considerably in the last 10 years.

Here, Javed shares how he took BAT from a global portfolio of datacentres and factories running different technologies to a single, streamlined cloud estate.

Embrace the change

It all started with BAT’s push to the cloud, which began 10 years ago. Like “everybody” in “the good old days,” BAT operated a network of on-prem datacentres in factories, business premises and sales offices.

The agility and scalability of cloud was a big pull factor; suddenly, the team could do in minutes or hours what had previously taken days or weeks – and they could do it for less money.

The security boost also helped. The cyber environment has become “more challenging” in the last decade, especially for a firm that was trying to protect datacentres in 100+ different locales with diverse technology sets. Working with partners like Microsoft and AWS to protect cloud environments has been “a major step change.”

“Even if I had doubled my cyber spend on my datacentres in terms of protection, I wouldn’t be at the level where I am today.”

Pit partners against each other

Involving two of cloud’s biggest beasts turns out to have been a smart move on Javed’s part, giving BAT “a nice competitive tension between the two big service providers.”

Both AWS (mostly responsible for the North American business) and Microsoft Azure (running the rest of the world) are “great services,” but “90% of the things [they provide] are almost the same.”

Javed used that similarity to get the most out of his investments, placing the majority of his estate with the provider that could offer the most value.

Sharing BAT’s transformation roadmap with partners was also a big help in guiding investment:

“If you have a roadmap, you can actually go and see what else you can do with that service provider for your overall digital plan, versus just treating it as one transaction…

“Other than just doing the technical move from local datacentres to cloud, we also were able to work on certain IT projects…with the sponsorship of our partners on cloud.”

Javed admits BAT’s size – it’s part of the FTSE 100 – was a tremendous help in this period, as partners were incentivised to invest in areas that would assist such an important customer. Microsoft’s commercial account team, for example, put $5 million into a project BAT was working on because of how much it was moving into the Azure environment.

Leave the complexity till last

By December BAT had moved 60% of its estate to cloud. That jumped closer to 80% this year, when the company moved its on-prem SAP instance into SAP Rise; and Javed thinks they’ll hit 85% by the end of 2025.

The SAP migration was “one of the most complex movements” of the transition, taking about 18 months from planning to execution.

“[BAT’s SAP instance] has roughly 18,000 interfaces and 154,000 transactions happening every day… How do you move that?”

For Javed, it meant working closely with AWS and Microsoft, as well as SAP itself, to develop “detailed planning,” which sped the process up over time.

“What I think we got better at is not moving bigger data sets; we got better at planning how to migrate on the cloud environment.”

SAP wasn’t the only difficult part of the cloud journey; there was a physical element to it, too.

“Our biggest challenge was our factories. Most of our factories are in remote locations and we were initially under the impression that you need a local datacentre for your factory operations. That was one of the…barriers we saw in the early days, but last year we successfully removed that barrier.

“Our factory in Mexico became the first factory that is now on cloud.”

The factories represent most of the final 15% of the IT estate BAT has to move to the cloud, but the pace is picking up. There are now three fully in the cloud, and Javed expects to reach 95% cloud operations within the next two years.

When I ask him for the biggest lesson he’s learned from 10 years of migration work, there isn’t even a hint of a pause:

“Don’t start by moving your SAP Enterprise – start small. And I’d strongly encourage not having a local datacentre at all.”