Baldor Electric Consolidates Global Implementation of SAP(R) Solutions Onto IBM Mainframe Running Linux

LINUXWORLD -- IBM today announced that Baldor Electric, a global designer and manufacturer of industrial electric motors and generators, has reduced its operations overhead and IT costs, while improving performance of its core business applications by 40 percent by consolidating its global implementation of SAP® solutions on the IBM mainframe.

Baldor Electric consolidated several UNIX-based servers onto one IBM eServer zSeries 990. Using zSeries partitioning and virtualization technologies, Baldor is able to run the entire set of its global SAP applications in 24 separate and secure partitions on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and z/OS, all on a single box. The company relies on SAP solutions running on zSeries to power its entire business -- including sales and distribution, manufacturing, payroll and finance -- supporting the work of 3,800 employees worldwide.

"The migration of our SAP application servers to Linux on the zSeries produced an immediate increase in performance, and has made it easier to manage and maintain our systems," said Mark Shackleford, director of Information Systems, Baldor Electric. "This consolidation project made it possible for us to take on innovative initiatives like the ShopFloor Display portal. It has also significantly trimmed the total cost of IT and reduced the administrative workload on our department -- requiring less than 40 technology professionals to run our global operation."

The company moved to the IBM zSeries mainframe because of its unmatched capability for availability and reliability. Baldor estimates $100,000 per hour of projected costs for systems downtime.

Another major step of Baldor's IT transformation was upgrading from the SAP R/3® solution to the latest version of mySAP( TM ) Business Suite with the SAP NetWeaver( TM ) open integration and application portal. Based on SAP NetWeaver and the SAP Enterprise Portal component, which SAP recently made available in support of the zSeries mainframe, the company will add support for new applications including mySAP Customer Relationship Management ( mySAP CRM ), mySAP Supplier Relationship Management ( mySAP SRM ), and its ShopFloor Display portal. ShopFloor Display will serve as a dashboard to effectively integrate all applications, data and Web content to develop a manufacturing execution process.

Baldor Electric has also chosen IBM's TotalStorage DS8000 storage system for back-up and recovery of its nearly 14 terabytes of critical data. The storage system is connected to the mainframe.

To achieve increased application performance, Baldor is using HiperSockets ( server-to-server communication with near-zero latency ) for communication between the database servers on DB2 UDB for z/OS and the SAP application servers running on Linux for zSeries.

"By simplifying its infrastructure on the mainframe, Baldor's IT staff optimized the IT performance so they could take on more innovative projects to transform the business," said Terri Virnig, vice president, IBM eServer zSeries. "More companies are harnessing the combined productivity and reliability of SAP solutions on the IBM zSeries mainframe to meet the always-on requirements of operating in global, integrated environments."

Baldor Electric was an early adopter of SAP solutions on the IBM mainframe -- one of the first U.S. companies to run SAP R/3 on the mainframe in the late 1990s. In the ensuing years, Baldor says it has realized an annual decrease in its IT infrastructure costs due to the centralized deployment of SAP solutions on the IBM zSeries platform.

SAP Enterprise Portal on the IBM eServer zSeries
SAP recently introduced support for the SAP Enterprise Portal on the zSeries mainframe, completing support for nearly all SAP NetWeaver components on the zSeries platform. SAP NetWeaver is a comprehensive integration and application platform that works with a customer's existing IT infrastructure to enable and manage change. The SAP Enterprise Portal, a core component of SAP NetWeaver, unifies key information and applications to give users a single view that spans the enterprise.

About Baldor Electric
Baldor Electric Company markets, designs, and manufactures industrial electric motors, drives and generators. From its home office in Fort Smith, Ark., Baldor supports the sales offices/warehouses that stock Baldor products worldwide, selling to distributors and original equipment manufacturers in more than 55 countries. Baldor products are available from 40 sales offices/warehouses in North America and 25 offices serving international markets. These products are produced at 15 plants in the U.S., and one in Bristol, England. For more information on Baldor Electric Company, visit www.baldor.com.

About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of on demand business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.


The following are either trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both: IBM, the IBM e-business logo, zSeries and eServer. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

SAP, R/3, mySAP, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and several other countries all over the world.

UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.

All others are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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