Real World Customers Seeing Real World Benefits

Real world experiences of business with AIV paint a compelling picture of its potential. Rotech Healthcare, a US home healthcare company, wraps patients in a cocoon of services that turns homes into valid alternatives to hospitals and convalescent homes. Nothing can interrupt the flow of information between the company's Florida data center and its employees if the company is to make home health care work for its patients. Efficient, cost-effective communications are essential.

However, due to numerous single points of failure in the underlying infrastructure for up to 40 key internal applications, the flow of information at Rotech was frequently interrupted. Applications ran on approximately 20 disparate servers that ran different versions of third-party application servers. The motley mixture became a management issue because versioning, tracking and keeping machines up to date required more and more attention.

Application infrastructure virtualization eliminated maintenance headaches and made IT staff available to develop needed components, which will allow Rotech to reposition a number of employees from manual processes and improve automation, resulting in projected cost decreases  and increases in revenue. Marlin Clark, Director of Information Systems-Technology, Rotech Healthcare Inc., sums it up this way: "The performance of our applications has been phenomenal. The speed of interactions has exceeded our expectations.  The efficiency of our IT team has improved enormously compared to where we started out initially with siloed systems."

Let's take a look at a leading Asian financial institution with more than 1,000 branch locations. As a result of organic growth and acquisitions, the bank ended up with an IT infrastructure that consisted of multiple heterogeneous platforms and disparate applications. The bank struggled to integrate its systems and provide business users with required information in the right context and at the right time. Specifically, the bank's customer presentation platform utilized outdated, non-standardized technology and was approaching end-of-life in terms of both support and maintenance.  It needed to modernize its customer presentation platform with standardized, state-of-the-art technology from a leading IT vendor.

A new customer presentation platform provides a strategic shared services infrastructure that will facilitate future IT deployments for the client. The financial institution  now has the ability to roll out other software-based applications without experiencing system outages.  By using AIV, the bank has been able to consolidate dozens of disparate applications while simultaneously increasing the availability and reliability of its services to business clients.

The lesson is simple: Just because organizations have implemented virtualization in servers, network, and storage, they should not assume they have taken virtualization as far as it can go. Application infrastructure virtualization offers a whole new roadmap for, quite literally, doing more with less in the Green data center.

Companies like IBM can provide free Value Assessment consulting services which provide insight into an organization's current application server environment, along with the financial and operational performance benefits resulting from AIV technologies like WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, including cost reductions in hardware and software, administration and planned maintenance cost savings, and reductions in unplanned outages.  For more information, read the Value Assessment brochure:ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/WebSphere_Virtual_Enterprise_Value_Assessment.pdf

IBM