IBM-owned SXiQ delivers migration for Bega Cheese following acquisition of rival dairy giant Lion Dairy and Drinks

IBM-owned, Melbourne-based cloud integrator SXiQ has completed migration services for Bega Cheese as part of its $560 million acquisition of rival dairy giant Lion Dairy & Drinks.

Bega bought Lion Dairy & Drinks in late 2020, which owns brands, such as Dairy Farmers, Yoplait, Big M, Dare, Masters, Juice Brothers, Daily Juice,  and Farmers Union iced coffee.

Bega Cheese chief information officer Zack Chisholm said in a statement that the Vegemite owner required Lion Dairy & Drinks’ applications, data and processes to be transitioned into its existing and expanded infrastructure.

Chisholm said that infrastructure migration and transition of 31 physical sites performing production, distribution and administration duties, had to be completed within a 12-month window with minimal disruption to the operations of both businesses. 

Bega Cheese’s IT team partnered with SXiQ on end-state design, migration planning and execution for several parts of the project - such as migration of applications, databases and associated backups, implementation of prod and non-prod AWS accounts and a landing zone to house all LD&D workloads. The work also included implementation of a continuous integration and continuous deployment toolset and workflow built on CloudFormation, Ansible, Jenkins and GitLab.

SXiQ said it also assisted Bega Cheese’s IT team with cloud cost optimisation strategies for efficient consumption of cloud resources to support the newly acquired business, and uplifting the cloud ops team to ensure Bega Cheese IT incorporated true DevSecOps into its core capability to support the new platform.

SXiQ chief executive officer John Hanna said, “our experts executed deep analysis, strategic thinking, and detailed planning to ensure the successful migration of Lion to Bega Cheese’s existing infrastructure.”

“By uplifting infrastructure, cloud management tooling and practices, SXiQ has enhanced management of Bega Cheese’s cloud assets, improving consistency, security and reducing time to deploy cloud infrastructure in the future.” 

Global tech giant IBM acquired SXiQ late last year for an undisclosed sum to bolster its Consulting’s Hybrid Cloud Services business’ Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure consulting capabilities.