Manufacturer Switches to IBM

It's a common scenario: Greif, a Delaware, Ohio-based industrial packaging provider, made some major acquisitions in the late '90s and early '00s. But by tripling in size, the company wound up with a multitude of data centers, applications and hardware. Greif's CIO and vice president, Ken Andre, was charged with rationalizing the growing companies' IT infrastructure, making it more "standardized, centralized and globalized," he says.

"Doing nothing was not an option," Andre says. "We were starting to outgrow the HP system we had, and we wanted to do more while reducing our data centers." On the server front, Andre had been aware of the major R&D effort at IBM around its iSeries. But the turning point came when he got an excited call from his SSA Global account manager, who was touring an IBM facility in France and got a look at the iSeries pre-launch. He thought Greif would be a perfect early adopter.

After signing "a lot of nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements, because it was not yet on the market," Andre says, Greif began the consolidation onto an IBM eServer i5 570 system, with the help of SSA Global and Sirius Computer Solutions. In doing so, Greif reduced its number of regional data centers from 12 to three in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Greif also streamlined its two ERP systems, SSA Baan and SSA BPCS, onto the single platform.

Andre says he had so much confidence in the project team and planning that on the final cut-over day, he was not even on site--he was attending a Notre Dame/Boston College football game. "The cut-over went very well," he says. "From an end-user standpoint, they didn't even notice a difference, which is a good thing." His ultimate goal is to further consolidate and see the three regional data centers become a single global data center.