AEGON Asset Management UK is best known for its award winning expertise in
fixed income investment along with a growing reputation in equity investments and a
distinguished record in managing ethical funds. AEGON Asset Management in the UK manages around £40 billion of assets on behalf of individuals, institutions and insurance companies.

ReQuest not only has found what they were looking for, it was able to help them better understand how WMQ Logs actually work. It also gave them control over practically every fault situation by analyzing the available WMQ recovery logs. In addition, ReQuest is used for application errors and design analysis in their development and test environments.

EDF Energy is one of the largest energy companies in the UK. It employs over 12,000 people, is the largest electricity supplier for London, the south east and the south west of England and supplies energy to around 5.1 million customers. The backbone of EDF Energy’s multi-platform CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application is Siebel® eBusiness. EDF Energy identified a requirement to upgrade a number of existing customer service related applications to offer added functionality and platform portability to their customers. Cressida’s ReQuest™ for WebSphere MQ provided EDF Energy with a reliable, scalable, flexible solution to their requirement for a reliable Replay facility to test and migrate their important new application to the production environment. EDF have also used ReQuest features to track missing in-transit messages and for recovery of queues to a point in time before a failure due to hardware problems.

Sandvik is a high-technology engineering group with advanced products and a world-leading position within their specialized areas. Sandvik run their applications on a broad mix of operating systems including zOS, OpenVMS and i5 platforms with their business critical Raw Material Optimization (ROS), Lift Control Systems (STB), and Central Warehouse applications on OpenVMS. Their problem was that the OpenVMS platform, which is strategic to Sandvik, was not covered by IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON software in the same way as their other WMQ platforms.

The BPI Group -- headed by Banco BPI -- is a multinational financial specialist group focusing predominantly on commercial banking activity. Occasionally, incidents occur along the transaction chain for the two primary production MQ servers running MQ 5.3 on a HP9000 RP7420 and MQ 6.0 on zOS that result in a transaction not having completed as desired. Banco BPI needed to be able to track and find the missing messages between the two MQ Servers when such unexpected incidents occurred.

A multinational financial company using WebSphere MQ for internal applications and data exchange with external customers. After a minor outage requiring the recovery of one of their applications, it was discovered that the MQ logs did not contain the expected records. Further investigation uncovered the cause – the application concerned was not using ‘persistent’ messages.

During 2006, a new business critical application was under development. Severn Trent considered this application an important part of the strategy for maintaining their position as a world class Utility provider. A central and vital component of this application was again WMQ and there was a critical requirement to implement rapid emergency recovery in the event of an application failure. A crucial part of this process was the ability to restore the MQ queue managers to the same point in time quickly and accurately. This type of functionality was not provided for in the application design or in the underlying native WMQ.

Daimler Chrysler Bank is recognized as one of the leading vehicle financing institutions in Germany. DC Bank’s offerings include financing, leasing, insurance, fleet management and, since July 2002, credit facilities for Mercedes-Benz™, Smart™, Chrysler™, Jeep™ and Setra™ brands. DC Bank wanted to improve the delivery, recovery options and performance of its WMQ infrastructure by:

• providing a capability to confirm the timely delivery of WMQ messages and to track the missing messages
• being able to provide point-in-time and full recovery of messages and queues
• improving DC Bank’s overall WMQ performance capability.

Banksys develops and manages retail-payment systems for the Beglian banks, merchants, and consumers. A significant part of their work is the management of all Beglian debit cards and electronic wallets. With a billion payment transactions a year, Banksys has an important responsibility in the Belgian national economy, offering its customers high performance and 24x7 availability amongst a number of service offerings.

The OpenVMS platform, which is strategic to Banksys, was not covered in the same way as Tandem and Solaris where Banksys uses Tivoli Omegamon products to manage their systems. This is where Cressida's TeQuest so nicely filled the gap to extend the Tivoli Omegamon Monitoring environment to include the OpenVMS and Tru64 WMQ platforms.

Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP) provides worldwide Employer Services, Brokerage Services, Dealer Services and Claims Services to customers worldwide. ADP has more then 40,000 employees and 500,000 customers, processing 30 million paychecks per year with annual revenue of $7 billion US Dollars. ADP was looking to provide a WMQ Messages Tracking and Auditing facility that confirmed timely delivery of WMQ messages, and to demonstrate the ability to recover lost messages and objects within the government mandated timeframe service levels.

ADP's Manager of System Services Ton van Der Starre comments, "When we first looked at ReQuest, it seemed too good to be true. It contained everything we needed, required us to make no changes to a project that was nearing completion and last, but not least, it was a cost-effective solution."

With ReQuest™’s multi-machine message propagation report, the current whereabouts of the message can be found immediately, plus the complete history of the journeys of the request-message and the reply-message.

Craig Roberts is chief information officer for Iqubed, a Houston-based consulting firm specializing in maximizing business potential through inspired design and deployment of technology. Roberts has used Ecora Software products for approximately two years. He sent this Q&A case study to tell us how it is going.

Elias VarVarezis, a Unisys Systems Architect, had to assess and reconfigure a government data center network that had grown rapidly from 3,000 to 40,000 users (soon to be 60,000) and had inconsistent performance standards and inadequate backup and configuration documentation. The lack of documentation necessitated a complete IT audit. “We had neither the time nor the staff to go out and manually document each server on the network,” VarVarezis says. “Without some type of automation, the best you can do is document a small number of servers and make assumptions about the rest.” VarVarezis wanted to sort 142 servers into categories for configuration, but auditing even one was a monumental task.

“A lot of times you go to a site to audit a network, and the IT staff has no idea what’s out there,” says Herb Meyerowitz, director of technical services for General Networks. “They don’t know what devices are out there, who has access to each server, the status of patch levels and hot fixes, to say nothing of how the current standards and configuration settings have changed over time.” Servers and routers may be strewn across the continent with other network devices. Manually auditing one server is tedious and time-consuming even when you know where it is. Auditing an enterprise is a mind-boggling proposition.

Lincoln Electric is a world leader in the design, development and manufacturing of arc welding products and robotics welding systems. Currently, Lincoln Electric is using Mail Attender for Lotus Notes to enforce retention policies and to perform keyword searches that locate and retrieve specific data.

Kaspick & Company is a provider of trust account investment and management services to non-profit institutions. Currently, Kaspick and Company uses Mail Attender for Exchange to enforce email retention policies for space reclamation.

As one of the world’s largest logistics providers and transportation companies, Schenker has over 1,000 branches worldwide. Currently, Schenker is using PST Attender to compact PST files, zip attachments and restrict PST file inventory.

To keep up with the demands of dynamic, on demand environments, CIOs and their business partners need a new approach that integrates availability, performance and problem management processes and tools in a more collaborative and real-time way. This White Paper demonstrates how IBM Challenge the Availability Management Status Quo.