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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Fieb who wrote (3579)	7/15/2001 9:38:16 AM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 4808

Another take on Shell.... Friday, July 13, 2001, 1:52 PM ET. Shell Consolidates Applications, Vendors By Mitch Wagner Royal Dutch/Shell Group plans to consolidate its global applications over the next 18 months in a program designed to save as much as $40 million, or 20 percent of the total cost of operating ERP apps over five years. The project, called MegaCentre, will consolidate 60 SAPinstallations now scattered worldwide into three data centers, called MegaCentre Hubs. They will be located in The Hague, the Netherlands; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Houston. Each hub will consist of hundreds of servers. In all, they will serve 90,000 users in 100 countries. In addition to its reducing costs, Shell views the project as a way to build a standard set of interfaces for e-business apps to communicate with partners. As part of the project, the energy giant is standardizing on a single vendor in several key technology categories. This month, Shell said it will standardize on IBM storage and eServer pSeries Unix servers, formerly known as the RS/6000, paying IBM more than $100 million over five years. Shell now uses a mix of IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems Unix systems for 95 percent of its servers. "We're able to lower the vendor's cost of sales and we minimize our [total cost of ownership] by reducing the diversity in the infrastructure," said MegaCentre program manager Carl Crites. "Instead of routinely going to the lowest cost provider and swapping out stuff every 18 months, we're establishing a longer-term relationship with suppliers. It allows us to reduce the churn." Shell is finalizing deals to standardize on single vendors for other key technologies, including databases and carrier services to connect the data centers with one another and with users. Shell is like most companies in seeking to simplify its IT infrastructure, but the scale of what it is attempting makes the program noteworthy, said Gartner Group analyst Paul McGuckin. "What Shell is doing is dramatic because it looks like they're spending a ton of money moving to fresh hardware," McGuckin said. No used .com servers or storage for these guys. Maybe they'll settle on 2G SAN and big directors?