Escorts Group, one of India’s leading engineering conglomerates, is adopting a workload-optimized solution based on IBM’s Power 750 Express and Power 740 Express to replace the company’s existing ERP system infrastructure. IBM reports that the advanced systems will provide enhanced performance and compliment the company’s business growth goals of lowering overall IT operating costs.

“Escorts Group has embarked on a journey of IT transformation to achieve operational and manufacturing excellence,” notes Vipin Kumar, Group CIO for Escorts Limited. “To achieve this we are not only going beyond adhering to prevailing norms, we are in fact setting our own standards and relentlessly pursuing them to achieve our desired benchmarks of excellence. To aid us in this journey we needed a scalable and high-performing IT infrastructure, backed by a robust technology roadmap. IBM clearly had the best solution, while ensuring a reduction in our energy footprint and increasing return on investment.”

Escorts Group is expanding its current deployment of Oracle’s Oracle Applications ERP software to cover two new divisions, which represents a utilization increase of approximately 40 percent. During the hardware evaluation process to support the expansion, Escorts considered various options including Itanium-based servers from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine. The company, however, chose to replace its existing HP PA-RISC servers with the IBM Power Systems. Each of the systems is complemented by IBM System Storage DS5000s and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software.

The new infrastructure resides in Escorts Group’s newly-built corporate data center and will manage the company’s disaster recovery system in addition to the ERP system. In addition to gains in performance and reliability, IBM says the new solution is expected to provide Escorts Group with savings in power and cooling costs of between 30 to 35 percent, over a three year period.