Business Management

A legally mandated reform of public accounting in Italy is causing an examination of financial management practices and systems in order to comply with new regulatory standards. Viewing the reform as an opportunity to increase operational efficiency, the province of Bolzano has initiated a four-year project to integrate local and specialized accounting programs. The solution to the challenge was to establish a partnership between IBM and SAP to provide the data management and analytical capabilities that Bolzano required. The solution helped Bolzano to have a consolidated approach to financial management that increases governmental operating efficiencies. tech news

Simon Jersey, a subsidiary of German retail group Quelle, is one of the UK's leading corporate workwear suppliers. They wanted to reduce workflow costs and provide exceptional customer service in a high-volume business. After extensive evaluation, total cost of ownership and reliability emerged as the key factors, and based on these criteria the company selected TALENT CRM from Computer Software Group, and upgraded to IBM eServer iSeries Model 820. tech news

Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) has been helping customers answer the call of the wild since 1938, when the company was formed as a co-op for Pacific Northwest climbing enthusiasts. Despite its marketing strengths, however, REI lacked the ability to sense and respond to market fluctuations because its outdated financial reporting processes could not keep up with management's demands for performance data. Wanting to be more responsive to the reporting needs of its managers, analysts and strategic planners, REI sought a solution that would not disrupt its user base and create the need for massive retraining. Impressed with the analytical capabilities of Hyperion Essbase software, it chose IBM DB2 OLAP Server, Version 8.1-which includes Essbase-as it's analytical and reporting engine. tech news

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, (the Institute, www.met.no) is responsible for short- and- longrange weather and ocean forecasting for Norway, and also provides daily predictions of pollution levels. They needed to deliver more accurate weather, ocean and pollution forecasts, more frequently and develop weather forecasts and climate models for national and international customers. The Institute chose a cluster of 40 IBM eServer Model 325 servers, each with dual AMD Opteron processors running Red Hat Linux. The cluster is linked using Myrinet low-latency highspeed networking technology, and managed with Scali Manage, from IBM Business Partner Scali. tech news

For Avis Futures to succeed in its objective, the team wanted to enable the infrastructure to support any business service the business managers could dream up. That meant providing an environment that would scale to support a large number of users and that would automate administrative functions to enable better use of staff time. Working with IBM Global Services, Avis Futures is implementing IBM WebSphere Business Integration and IBM Tivoli identity management solutions to drive the company's new infrastructure service. IBM WebSphere MQ for z/OS software and IBM WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker technology enable the sharing of data between new online applications and the Avis reservation, rental and information management system that resides on an IBM eServer zSeries mainframe system running IBM DB2 Universal Database software. tech news