I received an email this week about two customers who are faced with the exact same problem: improving IT efficiency.
The common threads in their quest for IT efficiency are consolidation and virtualization. At a high level it stands to reason that by consolidating systems and deploying virtualization their IT infrastructure will become more efficient.
One of the customers (Highmark) is in the healthcare industry. The other customer (JCPenney) is in the retail industry.
Highmark's Requirements and Challenges
As Highmark goes about solving the problem of IT efficiency they have some complex regulatory requirements that are common to healthcare infrastructures:
- security
- records retention
- standardization of healthcare records
- navigation of financial transactions (payer, provider, patient)
In addition, Highmark is facing a challenge in the area of service level agreements (SLAs) given their mixture of mainframe and open systems.
JCPenney's Requirements and Challenges
As JCPenney goes about solving its problem of IT efficiency they have a different set of requirements that fall into the category of uptime in their back office infrastructure.
- building HA and redundancy into the back office
- re-defining data protection
- scoping business continuity in terms of back office applications
The main challenge? Historically back office applications aren't geared towards high availability. In JCPenney's case, this has to change.
A Tale Of Two Approaches
Both business will consolidate and virtualize in order to solve their problems, but they will do so in different ways.
Highmark will focus on a service-oriented approach, reducing complexity in their own computing infrastructure via stack integration.
JCPenney will build redundancy directly into applications with a specific emphasis on databases.
What's interesting about these two particular customers?
They have both volunteered to sit down with Dave Vellante of Wikibon and publicly discuss the strategies that I have mentioned above (thanks to Dave for providing the above information).
Mark O'Gara of Highmark and Daryl Molitor of JCPenney will join Dave this Monday June 22 at 3:00-4:00 PM EST.
I definitely plan on listening in, and you can too. Register here.
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
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