The country`s largest bulk transport company, Tanker Services, has turned to ICL South Africa to accelerate the company`s drive into the new millennium with a new Y2K-compliant Windows NT environment comprising a Fujitsu Cordant server, an Exchange server and a Proxy server running TCP/IP.
The entire installation was completed within three days and has already resulted in vastly improved response times to user requests and associated performance and profitability optimisation.
"Logging on to the Gauteng-housed mainframe from the Cape Town and Durban regions used to take almost 15 minutes. It`s now down to 30 seconds, while downloading information from our Germiston depot to Cape Town has been drastically cut from the better part of a day to just 30 minutes," says Tanker Services` IT manager, Peter Norris.
Tanker Services is part of the Imperial Holdings group and manages the largest bulk transport fleet in South Africa, with 500 vehicles operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from 14 depots around the country.
Norris adds that Tanker Services has been a customer of ICL South Africa`s since the company`s first mainframe was installed almost two decades ago.
During the ensuing years, ICL has provided Tanker Services with most of its IT requirements and has, in the words of Norris, "always added value in the true sense of the word. We have been impressed by the pro-active attitude of the ICL support personnel, who have always been willing to go that extra mile for us."
He is also confident that ICL`s global alliance with Microsoft - and the importance ICL SA clearly places on the alliance - will bring even greater rewards to Tanker Services. Here, he notes that apart from the rapid implementation, the global alliance allowed ICL to reduce the project costs substantially, to the point where a solution hitherto outside Tanker Services` budget was now within reach.
"And as a small IT department, we are satisfied that in the ICL solution and with ICL`s wealth of Microsoft expertise, we have partners prepared to help us along our chosen path in a cost-effective and efficient manner that results in enormous time and cost savings and an ever-improving service to our customers," says Norris.
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ICL SA
ICL is a global IT services company. It designs, builds and operates information systems and services for customers in the retail, finance government, telecoms, utilities and travel markets. The company has operations in over 40 countries and employs over 22,000 people.
Transformed from a manufacturer of computers, today ICL improves business performance and competitiveness through services focused on electronic business, enterprise applications and implementation and outsourcing of IT infrastructure.
Despite being a global technology giant, ICL SA is firmly rooted in South Africa and as a truly South African entity, is fully committed to being more representative of the country`s business, economic and social demographics. Thebe Sci Tech, the prominent and respected black empowerment group, owns 40% of the company, the ICL Group 54%, and Old Mutual and the ICL staff share incentive scheme the remaining 6%.