Lion Nathan(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 35

Senior IS executive: Darryl Warren, CIO
Reports to: CFO
Size of IS shop: 75

PCs: 1550
Mobile PCs: 1300
Terminals: 400
Hand-held devices: 500
Total screens: 3750

Industry: Manufacturing
PC environment: HP; Dell; Windows XP, Vista
Server environment: Windows 2003, 2008; Linux; HP
DBMS: SQL, Oracle, Progress
Address: Level 7, 68 York Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; and 111 Carlton Gore Road, Newmarket, Auckland
Website: www.lion-nathan.com
Key IS projects this year: Not disclosed.

Lion Nathan, one of ANZ’s largest corporate alcoholic beverages companies, originated in New Zealand in 1914 as New Zealand Breweries. Since then, the company has expanded its operations to become a leading brewer, winemaker and marketer of alcohol in the Australasian and international markets. Approximately 1400 people are employed by the company in New Zealand. Lion Nathan International (LNI) exports to more than 20 countries worldwide, with LNI’s operations reporting to the New Zealand business. An acquisition by Kirin Holdings Company was completed in October 2009 and the company was removed from the ASX and NZSX the same month.

CIO Darryl Warren is a keen adopter of best of breed technology to support business objectives and growth. Trans-Tasman bandwidth increases were negotiated ahead of actual demand to prepare infrastructure in anticipation of need. Virtualisation has been another strong area of focus, with the organisation’s quality assurance and development environments almost entirely virtualised. The company maintains loyalty to Microsoft for desktop operating systems, email and UC functionality. Cisco is vendor partner of choice for VoIP and networking, while data warehousing is run via an Oracle back end.

Lion Nathan says delivering on its objectives means “constantly finding better, more efficient ways to do business, both internally and with our partners. And that means reviewing, revising and ultimately improving our systems and processes, and having the right people in the right roles to deliver them”.