INDUSTRY WATCH
THE FEATURES , FUNCTIONALITIES AND WHERE WE WERE WANTING TO PROGRESS OUR BUSINESS MODEL AS A COMPANY FELL IN LINE WITH WHAT WE FOUND IN THE BMC SOLUTION .
wWhat does your job role entail and what does this look like day to day ?
Currently I ’ m responsible for data center hosting and hybrid solutions . This involves Disaster Recovery and making sure there ’ s the business acumen and understanding of our application roadmap so that we have a better understanding of how we move forward with our initiatives – whether it ’ s on-prem or whether it goes to the cloud . With that , we have a heavy mix with our vendor management . We want to make sure that we have our managed services , so in the event that there ’ s any issues from infrastructure , we have those support teams in place to support the application levels .
How far are you involved with Walgreens ’ data center makeup ?
We have what ’ s known as life cycle management , where we have a three-to-five-year period where we look at the infrastructure from compute storage , making sure those infrastructures are at a compliant level and that they don ’ t go to an end-of-life support . We go through a budgeting refresh cycle periodically to make sure we can continue to meet those future growing demands on the applications .
How important is uptime and how do you manage the infrastructure to ensure smooth operation ?
From an uptime perspective , we take a lot of our business-critical applications and put them into high availability platforms . We do provide a faster mean time to recovery and failure based on how we can bring things back from a backup or relocate them from another location . That is a critical priority of ours , especially in areas where it ’ s tied to pharmacy and to supply chain and logistics . Those are the key areas we focus on to ensure we meet our customers ’ needs .
What challenges were you facing ahead of your work with BMC ?
The challenges I was facing , specifically with the product we use today , is that we had a single point of failure with our mainframe . We had our enterprise batch solution running on the mainframe and my CIO gave me a call one day and said : ‘ I ’ m very concerned that if this environment fails , what happens to our batching ? What happens to all our orders that need to go to distribution centers and to our supply chain ?’
So , he challenged me to come up with a solution and look for a product that we could switch to from the one we were using and because we already had a partnership with BMC with our Helix platform and my peers in the UK were already leveraging the same product , we wanted to focus on perhaps using this as a global solution . That then drove us to make sure we were partnering with BMC to drive that same type of platform in the US .
Why did you decide to work with BMC and how did it stand out from the crowd ?
One of the reasons was that we had already established a relationship with BMC . Another reason is the commitment and ownership that it has behind its product and service . The features , functionalities and where we were wanting to progress our business model as a company fell in line with what we found in the BMC solution .
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