BoE Corporate has bought five IBMRS/6000 servers from JSE-listed e-infrastructure company Faritec in a multimillion-rand deal to run a number of major business applications based on its recently acquired SAP R/3 ERP system.
"SAP R/3 requires that each function of the application - SAP production, SAP development, SAP Q&A, business warehouse production and development - be run on independent servers, hence the need for five RS/6000 servers," says Ramesh Ishwarlaal, director of Faritec in Durban. BoE Corporate ordered and implemented one model M80, three Model H-80s and one F-80.
BoE Corporate, a division of BoE Bank, specialising in commercial and industrial property finance and other asset financing for the middle corporate market, decided to switch to SAP R/3 because of the expanded nature of its services, with which its legacy system could not cope.
"The ERP solution will encompass all of BoE Corporate`s current and planned business systems, with the separate servers ensuring that any application can be thoroughly tested without risk of impacting upon other current live activities," says Ishwarlaal.
"After a thorough process of evaluation and elimination, we chose SAP R/3 as our future ERP solution. We then defined the platform on which to run it," says Chris Cullen, GM IT BoE Corporate. "We have had an RS/6000 running a separate application for the last 18 months and have been very impressed with its quality and up-time, which contributed to our acquiring the same proven hardware again," Cullen says.
The platform evaluation process was comprehensive, taking many factors into consideration and covering all major hardware vendors. BoE`s past experience, however, combined with user-friendliness, 12 years of BoE Corporate`s Unix experience and the level of support provided by Faritec and IBM, helped clinch the deal, with the entire system set to go live by the beginning of October this year.
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