HP helps 100 customers with adaptive solutions (page 1 of 2)

Customers such as CitiStreet, Atmos Energy Corporation and Aquila, Inc. are reaping the benefits that HP products, services and partners deliver to enable greater business agility - the ability to respond rapidly to changes in market conditions or customer demands - while lowering overall IT costs.

Companies worldwide are scrutinizing the agility, costs and labor issues associated with ownership of aging mainframe systems as rapidly changing business demands require more computing flexibility and access to the latest business applications.

While newer mainframes have a role to play in some specialized, niche environments, customers with older mainframes have turned to HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy and standards-based platforms for increased flexibility to synchronize business and IT while keeping costs under control.

"To meet evolving business requirements, IT organizations must minimize underlying infrastructure complexity while establishing the foundation for a new era of virtualized, utility-based, adaptive infrastructure," said Carl Greiner, senior vice president, Infrastructure Strategies, META Group. "IT expenditures must have strong business justification such as clear cost savings and improved agility."

CitiStreet is the second largest record-keeper in the United States and a premier provider of defined contribution, pension and health and welfare plans servicing more than 6 million participants.

The company's legacy environment did not offer the always-on infrastructure and failover configurations needed for their business to grow. CitiStreet found that it could double performance with the HP Superdome server and reduce costs by 37 percent over three years for hardware maintenance and software license expenses.

"As a company in the competitive benefits space, CitiStreet must respond quickly to ever-changing client needs," said Barry Strasnick, chief information officer, CitiStreet. "We are migrating from our mainframe systems to HP to increase our agility, reduce costs and accommodate growth. We anticipate a twofold performance increase and the scalability we need, as well as the ability to make changes quickly to meet market and client demands."

Recent customer evolutions from mainframes to HP systems also include:

Atmos Energy Corporation is one of the nation's largest pure natural gas distributors. After realizing its current mainframe environment was at its limits, Atmos Energy considered a newer mainframe but soon realized it could not provide the capacity, expandability and speed needed to accommodate the company's growth.

The company opted to offload its applications onto HP servers to be more agile and ensure the ability to adapt in real time to business needs. As a result of implementing HP systems, Atmos Energy has been able to accommodate the growth in its IT needs and to increase manageability, removing the 24x7 support needed with the mainframe environment and relying on HP OpenView management software to automate systems management and proactively alert IT managers to issues.

Aquila, Inc., an operator of electric and natural gas distribution facilities in seven U.S. states and Canada, faced the challenge of delivering greater IT infrastructure flexibility and capacity to support business initiatives while keeping costs down.

After reviewing the costs associated with mainframe maintenance, Aquila found that HP's servers gave them the flexibility to run applications on multiple platforms and helped drive costs down for the organization.