END USER INSIGHT
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 centres 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 .
How robust is your Business Continuity plan and what areas do you prioritise within this ?
In this specific area , our key decision was removing that single point of failure for Business Continuity . Now with our new solution , which includes leveraging the Control-M platform from BMC , we were able to architect this in the cloud environment to where we have more of a robust high availability solution , but we also have the capability of shifting it over to different regions within the cloud as well . So it gives us that better MTTR than what we had when it was something which was running on-prem with the other solution .
How has BMC met the criteria you required and how scalable has its solution been for you ?
It ' s been very scalable . One of the things we look forward to is that as we continue to ramp up more of our job scheduling in the platform , BMC has communicated to us that it has another SaaS platform . Right now , with the solution we ' re using , it does have that capability , but we ' ve seen some of the future releases of the newer model that ' s coming out which definitely
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