Large consumer products company

IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration reduces communications costs and boosts IT productivity

Headquartered in London, this large consumer products company’s leading brands are sold in dozens of markets worldwide. Employing more than 60,000 people, the firm’s subsidiary companies sold billions of units in 2010.

Challenge
Every large and complex global enterprise requires its business applications to communicate with one another. To govern the flow of information across its main corporate applications, this worldwide company used a message-oriented middleware (MOM) solution, but found it was unable to easily connect its corporate backbone to applications running at remote subsidiaries. Typically, each subsidiary has its own local systems for ERP and custom applications. The organization needed to extract sales history information from those systems and bring it into corporate applications. The business also needed to synchronize the subsidiaries’ technology with corporate purchasing, marketing and foreign exchange information. However, the cost of extending its MOM software to remote systems around the globe proved prohibitive. The company sought a standards-based, cost-effective and centrally managed solution featuring messaging and application integration.

Solution
IBM WebSphere Cast Iron® Cloud integration met these requirements. It simplifies cloud and on-premises data migration and application integration by using a “configuration, not coding approach” and features prebuilt connectors and prepackaged integration processes to simplify and broaden integration capabilities. For deployments with a majority of applications on premises, WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration provides physical integration appliances that offer remote management and monitoring capabilities.

The client used the appliances to create a “side road” to exchange information between its subsidiaries and the corporate messaging “highway.” A total cost of ownership (TCO) study showed significant savings over the existing solution: TCO reduction from just six countries targeted for initial rollout ranged from USD1.9 million to USD5.5 million per year, or 70 percent on average. The existing solution’s maintenance and support costs alone came in higher than the cost of deploying the WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud solution.

This analysis led the client to replace its existing MOM integration brokers with WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration appliances, saving USD2,400 per month per broker. Today the global firm uses the WebSphere solution for various integration projects around the world, including integration of SAP and Siebel applications, point-of-sale information, ENOVIA MatrixOne software and simple electronic data interchange (EDI) technology with partners. The firm manages all integration appliances from a service center in Asia.

Benefits
• Increased staff productivity by up to 16 times as a result of centralized management of remote deployments
• Enhanced use of IT resources because remote sites do not require deep integration expertise
• Accelerated adoption of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) thanks to a standards-based approach

For more information
To learn more about WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud technology, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/castiron