You and i: Happy Customers: Svendsen, SAP and IBM i

You and i: Happy Customers: Svendsen, SAP and IBM i

By Steve Will
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the newly published ITG study, which outlines the low total cost of ownership IBM i (twitter hashtag #ibmi) continues to provide. You can still find the executive overview of that study linked to the “Power of i” page.

Sometimes, though, examples speak louder than studies. Today I’ll use an example of one of our many happy customers: Svendsen.

Svendsen is a specialist distributor of DEUTZ engines, and also provides services for manufacturers such as Voith and Pleiger. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, the company focuses on southern Germany, and has subsidiaries in eastern Bavaria and Switzerland.

Svendsen employs around 30 people and is growing rapidly. This is the type of customer that benefits greatly from IBM i – they have a small staff, they want to run their business without worrying about running their system, and they want to do it efficiently.

Svendsen had been running an SAP Business One on Microsoft Windows. As they grew, they needed their system to grow with them. They decided to move to SAP’s Business All-in-One solution. Their IBM Business Partner, Kirbis, advised them to look at Power Systems and IBM i. I’ll let the customer speak:

“SAP Business All-in-One was almost an automatic choice for us – it is the obvious step-up from SAP Business One, and we were confident that Kirbis would do a good job on the implementation. For the same price as the proposed Intel architecture, we purchased a single, more powerful and scalable Power Systems server, with all the characteristic advantages of IBM i: legendary reliability, high resilience against viruses, and the built-in IBM DB2 database.” --Lutz Ilgner, CEO

Since the new IBM i implementation, Svendsen has been pleased with the performance of the solution, but is especially impressed with the reliability of IBM i on their Power System. The company has experienced no unscheduled downtime, and spends almost no time on the maintenance and administration of the hardware, operating system or DB2 database. Again, Mr. Ilgner:

“We need all our staff to be able to focus on our core business – we cannot afford their productivity to be hindered by the need to manage and maintain IT systems.”

What works in Germany works worldwide. Software solutions that do exactly what a business needs, running on a platform that doesn’t make the customer worry about multiple servers, security patches and reboots, but lets them focus on their own business. That’s IBM i.

Posted at 10:01 AM in DB2, IBM i, Power, SAP | Permalink