Blades

Galeries Lafayette Group is a leading retailer in France, with stores that include Galeries Lafayette and Nouvelles Galeries department stores, the Monoprix supermarket chain and BHV stores, which specialize in home decor and appliances. Like many businesses, SDDC's IT infrastructure has become increasingly distributed and complex over time. SDDC looked to IBM to propose an autonomic computing strategy that would enable the company to infuse self-managing capabilities into its infrastructure. Through its Autonomic Readiness Assessment, IBM Global Services evaluated the autonomic computing maturity level of SDDC's IT infrastructure and proposed solutions and a roadmap to increase its autonomic computing capabilities. tech news

Part of Arrow Electronics, Inc., the SPOERLE Group (www.spoerle.com/en) is a distributor of electronic components, founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dreieich, Germany. The challenge for SPOERLE was to deliver fast, reliable response to customer enquiries, extract better management information from existing business systems. To cope with growing customer demand, and increasing internal requirements for timely management information, SPOERLE replaced its two IBM AS/400 systems with a 4-way IBM eServer iSeries and a 2-way IBM eServer iSeries, sub-divided into a total of 9 logical partitions (LPARs). The new iSeries server runs all of SPOERLE's mission-critical applications, with IBM DB2 Universal Database at the heart of its operations. tech news

To improve customer service, companies are turning to innovative firms such as VoiceGenie Technologies Inc. Based in Toronto, Canada, VoiceGenie is a next-generation interactive voice response (IVR) system provider focused on delivering VoiceXML-based speech technologies. An IBM Embedded Solution Provider ESP) Partner, VoiceGenie has found an eager market willing to adopt its products to improve existing call center efficiency and lower costs. Equipped with IBM eServer systems running Linux, VoiceGenie's solutions allow customers the ease and comfort of speaking to an automated system. tech news

Despite increasingly complex animation requirements, Threshold needed to shorten the time required to produce a film, while keeping its costs low. Threshold also needed access to a scarce pool of talent from around the world while maintaining control of its processes. Threshold required flexible access to powerful computing resources to handle huge yet unpredictable peaks in processing load. Threshold engaged IBM to create an on demand e-studio system that provides an unlimited growth path with limited, variable costs. The system automates the flow of animation in progress across the world to create a unified corps of designers working around the world. tech news

Based in Amsterdam, Epson-Europe B.V. is the strategic, financial and administrative headquarters for the corporation's European, Middle Eastern and African activities. In order to reduce operational costs and improve service levels, Epson-Europe decided to move its outsourced SAP infrastructure back in house. The UNIX-based servers on which the software was running were at the end of their maintenance contract, and would have been expensive to maintain and support, so the organisation opted to replace them. Working with IBM Global Services, Epson-Europe has implemented 11 IBM eServer pSeries 650 servers running SAP R/3 4.6C and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) 3.0B on IBM AIX 5.2. The SAP R/3 environment serves 1,300 named users, while BW has 250. tech news