In the build-up to the start of the 2005 Formula One season, the technology partnership between McLaren Racing and Computer Associates has continued to develop, with the parent company of the West McLaren Mercedes Formula One team broadening its use of the CA product portfolio to realise more strategic value from the partnership.
CA, which has been a technology partner since 1997, will provide enterprise management, storage, security and knowledge management software to assist West McLaren Mercedes in looking for the 1/10s and 1/100s of a percentage performance differentiation that makes the difference on the race track. The Australian Grand Prix on Sunday 6 March marked the first competitive running by the team since adopting the additional products.
"We are effectively a small to medium business; however, very few organisations in the world have the competitive and very public performance benchmarks that we operate to in Formula One," states Jonathan Neale, Managing Director of McLaren Racing. "The breadth of CA has given us peripheral vision to find new ways to endeavour to achieve greater performance. As a consequence, we are delighted to increase the range of its solutions we use within McLaren Racing."
"We are not able to start our cars without IT but we are not an IT company. We are a racing team, with over 400 people working towards achieving success on track, and only nine of these are IT personnel to deal with all our IT needs," Neale added. "By working closely with CA, we are able to identify and integrate new uses of software to improve our handling of data, which has a direct impact on how well we can design, build and race our cars. We are a zero fault tolerance organisation - on a race weekend it is not conceivable that IT would let us down. CA is helping us to build the systems to ensure this doesn`t happen. For example, in the period from when work first began on our 2005 challenger, MP4-20, to its initial shakedown in January, CA`s eTrust solutions have helped prevent over 350 000 attempted hacks into our system."
"Formula One is the pinnacle of motor racing but it is also the pinnacle of IT usage by a company," said Mark Bridger, Country Sales Manager, CA. "The complexity of the IT environment and pressures on it to perform require a very clear overview of what IT can achieve and how it can contribute to the business. As one of the world`s biggest software companies with one of the broadest software portfolios, that bigger picture is what we can bring. Helping McLaren Racing to better protect, store and manage the mountains of data they collate from a variety of inputs directly contributes to their ability to drive greater performance out of the cars. That is a very tangible and visible form of return on investment."
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