Whirlpool Corporation

Whirlpool Corporation

James Haney

Vice President

Architecture and Planning

HANEY: Whirlpool Corporation is the leading manufacturer of white goods appliances on a global basis. About an $11 billion company, we manufacture in 14 countries around the globe. We actually sell in a little over 170 countries.

Whirlpool began its on demand business transformation, I would say, years ago. And when I say years ago, I think we were really practicing on demand way before on demand became an industry buzzword, if you will.

But the important thing about on demand in today's business changing times is the business expects a lot of flexibility to move quickly, to move fast, to bring functionality to the corporation and to our consumers that increase value and drive our brand.

And, to the point where we can actually automate more, divert resources to adding business functionality. I mean that's where I want to be, and that's where ultimately everybody I would think would want to be.

If I look at Tivoli's offerings in the on demand space and I look at it from the rest of the industry perspective, I think Tivoli has a very compelling story to tell.

A very specific on demand pain point I have really is in patch maintenance, if you will. In today's times, with viruses and having to keep desktops upgraded, how do you upgrade 20,000 desktops very quickly without interrupting the user that's using them? That's my biggest pain point right now.

To meet the one on demand pain point we have that's getting desktops refreshed we purchased Tivoli Configuration Manager.

In our first deployment of it we actually focused on an area where we have less IT people in South America, and today we're distributing to 3000 desktops unattended.

I think Tivoli has a very good roadmap when it comes to laying out what to do in an on demand space, because you can start in very specific areas like security or storage or computing resources.

And you can ultimately put in those components and you can continue to build your on demand environment until you're actually looking at things and running your environment from a business process perspective.

It's important to invest in on demand for two reasons: quality and speed. Quality from the aspect you're always trying to drive higher quality in all the services that you do because that relates to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Speed, from the standpoint that if you can do it faster, you're ultimately adding functionality quicker, sooner. And that actually drives customer value. It drives customer loyalty. It drives reducing cost. The faster you do things ultimately the cheaper it costs you to do that.

I think one of the other things that has helped Whirlpool in its journey in on demand is the relationship that IBM has Whirlpool and Whirlpool with IBM. We really work more in a partnership relationship than we do a customer/supplier relationship. And when you work at a partnership level, you really do reap a lot more benefits.