Given Imaging gains business insight with SAP ERP on IBM BladeCenter

Given Imaging, based in Yoqneam, Israel, develops and markets innovative solutions for the healthcare industry. The company employs around 450 people in Israel and at subsidiaries in the US, Germany, France, Australia, Japan and Singapore, and generated revenues of around US$ 95 million in 2006.

Given Imaging has pioneered the development of an innovative range of products that are set to revolutionize the diagnosis of gastrointestinal disorders. The company’s PillCam video capsule is a disposable miniature camera contained in a capsule that can be easily ingested by the patient. The capsule transmits high-quality color images of the gastrointestinal tract that enable physicians to visualize the small intestine and esophagus.

Haim Rozow, IT Consultant for Given Imaging, explains the company’s IT strategy: “Our innovative products give us a strong position in the market, but to capitalize on that position, we need to ensure that our supply chain, distribution network and internal operations are managed as efficiently as possible. In 2000, we took the decision to invest in an enterprise-class ERP solution that would support the company’s growth, and SAP seemed to offer the best long-term option.”

Given Imaging originally deployed SAP R/3^® 4.6 on a number of Dell servers, a solution which met the company’s needs for a number of years. As the business grew, the IT department realized that it could improve the service it offered to both internal users and end customers by introducing a number of new functionalities to the system, including a Web portal and business reporting capabilities.

“A couple of years ago, we started making increasingly heavy use of the data warehousing and portal components of the SAP software, but we realized that a lot of the things we wanted to do would be much easier if we upgraded to a new version of SAP ERP,” says Haim Rozow. “The SAP NetWeaver technology platform offered us the flexibility to extend our capabilities in ways that would have been unfeasible with our previous environment.”

Building a new infrastructure

Given Imaging decided to upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0, with the SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application and the SAP NetWeaver Portal and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI) components. However, its existing server landscape was not powerful enough to support the new software environment, so the company decided to rethink its hardware infrastructure.

“We looked at various options, and IBM seemed to offer the best solution,” says Haim Rozow. “We implemented three IBM BladeCenters with 35 Intel Xeon processor-based HS21 blade servers, linked to an IBM System Storage DS4800 disk system and an IBM 3584 Tape Library. IBM Global Technology Services – Strategic Outsourcing made an acceptable fixed-price offer to take over maintenance and support for the new infrastructure – saving the costs of employing more in-house IT staff, and helping us to concentrate on our core business.”

The IBM BladeCenter solution offers Given Imaging a powerful and scalable server architecture with a compact footprint – saving space in the data center and helping support business growth in a cost-effective manner. The BladeCenter chassis provides highly efficient integrated power and cooling for the hot-pluggable blade servers, boosting energy efficiency and reducing power and cooling costs.

The HS21 blade servers leverage powerful dual core 64-bit Intel Xeon processors to provide excellent performance for the SAP applications and the Microsoft SQL Server database that supports them.

Given Imaging has recently implemented VMware to virtualize the BladeCenter environment, helping to improve the utilization of the blade servers and deliver even better price performance.

Scalable storage

To compliment the BladeCenter, the DS4800 disk storage system provides a similar degree of scalability, with eight hot-pluggable drive ports and a maximum capacity of 112 TB when expansion units are attached. Supporting fiber-channel connections at speeds of up to 4Gbps, the DS4800 is ideal for high-throughput applications like SAP ERP, and the IBM System Storage DS4000 Storage Manager software makes maintenance and administration simple.

IBM Global Technology Services – Strategic Outsourcing manages the server and storage infrastructure for Given Imaging, and uses IBM Tivoli Storage Manager to back up the SAP software environment to the IBM 3584 Tape Library. Tivoli Storage Manager helps to reduce maintenance downtime by backing up data incrementally – instead of copying the entire SQL Server database to tape every day, Tivoli only transfers the data that has been added or edited since the previous backup.

“With IBM servers, storage, software and services, we have gained a highly stable and available infrastructure for our SAP software landscape – helping to support users around the world 24x7 and provide an excellent service to our customers,” says Haim Rozow.

Leveraging SAP NetWeaver

With the infrastructure in place, Given Imaging was able to develop and deploy several new functionalities within the SAP software environment.

“With SAP NetWeaver BI, our sales, finance and customer service teams now have access to a wealth of historical information and live data – helping them to analyze trends and create accurate forecasts,” explains Haim Rozow. “Executive dashboards enable close monitoring of KPIs and provide our management team with the information they need to make the right decisions for the business.”

By leveraging SAP CRM and SAP NetWeaver Portal together with the central ERP application, Given Imaging is able to provide a range of online services for end customers via a user-friendly Web portal running on IBM blade servers.

“The ability to develop complex, fully automated business processes that deliver value to our customers is a key benefit of the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, and fully justifies our move to SAP ERP 6.0,” he concludes. “And running our SAP applications on IBM BladeCenter and DS4800 hardware provides a high-performance, stable, scalable and cost-effective platform that will support the growth of our business for several years to come.”