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My name is David Murray. I work for AHOLD information services which is a wholly owned subsidiary of AHOLD USA,
We have approximately 1200 stores up and down the east coast in the United States and stores globally in the Netherlands and many other countries.
When we were looking for enterprise systems management tools, we looked at everything that was out there, and we came to the decision that we needed an integrated solution and Tivoli provided us with that integrated solution.
Automation is very important to AHOLD right now, like everybody else we are living in the days of limited budgets and we are all the time being forced to do more with less. The only way that we can do that, be successful and keep our business successful is to automate.
Currently we use Tivoli Provisioning Manager in our lab to get the best use out of our lab that we can to make sure we have 100% efficiency on all of the systems in our lab. It’s a tough environment because labs change and have many different rules and requirements that are not seen in production.
Tivoli Provisioning Manager will allow us to reconfigure machines instead of days and weeks it will take hours. Which gives us the flexibility to have a much tighter testing period in our lab and also a much better availability of shifting equipment between applications and needs requiring us to buy less equipment and getting better utilization out of the equipment that we do own.
In the past when I requested lab equipment, if I needed 10 systems it would take 2 to 3 weeks to get them and I would have maybe 8 different builds for those same 10 machines. Now, with Tivoli Provisioning Manager I can have all 10 machines all 10 systems in one day and they’ll all be exactly the same.
With Provisioning Manager I build the image that I want and I deploy that image to all the systems and they are all exactly the same.
One of the things we hope to get with Tivoli Provisioning Manager is when they systems built since we can define all the software that goes on that system, we can build the system, and we can automatically deliver the software to provision that system correctly in a minimum amount of time to allow it to be back in production with the least down time available.
IBM has been a partner with AHOLD in a number of initiatives and a lot of the things we’re doing. They’ve given us very solid support on our line of Tivoli products which we use every day, day in and day out, 24/7 to keep things running the way that we need to and help move us towards an automated state.
….we do a lot with event management and monitoring and configuration management and delivery and IBM Tivoli has been able to step up and provide us the tools that we need to make that happen.