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Sears Canada Inc.
Gary Charlton
National Manager of Information
Technology Operations for Sears Canada
CHARLTON: Sears Canada is about a six and a half billion dollar retail organization. We have in excess of 160 retail stores counting our different formats.
At Sears Canada, we have a few on demand pain points and business challenges. First of all, we're trying to reduce our IT costs on an ongoing basis. We have a very complex environment, with a lot of different platforms: AIX, Windows, mainframe, very complex, very difficult to debug problems.
In terms of the complexity of our environment, we're using a number of tools, IBM TEC Distributed Monitoring; we have Tivoli Storage Manager as well. We're using these tools to really enable us to improve the level of service, maintain the availability of the systems and provide much better response time across the board to our end customers.
Our applications are very much on demand. Our Sears.ca, our Web site, has to run 7 by 24 by 365. So we've built in failover, and it's an extremely complex application.
Where these tools really come to bear, monitoring what's going on, understanding CPU utilization, our network utilization and making sure that that's available 24 by 365.
The tools really are helping. Our availability mark over all applications is around 99.98 percent, and significant improvement year over year.
We have formal service level agreements with our customers, and we have yet not to meet those. The benefit of having on demand tools in an environment is basically we can get to root cause a lot quicker. We can maintain availability of our applications at an extremely high level.
We can share existing hardware between applications a lot easier, and meet or exceed our customers' expectations in terms of availability of those applications.
Routine operations can be automated. That's where we look first anything where we routinely had to take a standard action, we were able to automate that.
One of the benefits of going to an on demand environment is the ability to free up support staff, people that are involved in root cause analysis, and freeing them up to build applications that will better support the business going forward.
I think IBM is helping us greatly. We have a great support team in Toronto. The Tivoli support folks are fantastic. What gets me going for Sears Canada with IT is knowing that every transaction that every customer makes depends on IT.