IBM Helps Rotech Healthcare and Osaka Gas Accelerate Performance and Lower Costs Using WebSphere Virtual Enterprise

ARMONK, NY - May 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that businesses are taking advantage of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise to manage software applications and service oriented architecture (SOA) environments with minimal human interaction. The software increases application performance and lowers operational and energy costs required to create, run, and manage applications across an enterprise.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provides application infrastructure virtualization capabilities that dynamically deliver application server resources where they are needed most. The software separates applications and services from the underlying infrastructure. Workloads can then be dynamically placed and migrated across a pool of application server resources allowing the infrastructure to automatically adapt and respond to business needs. Requests are then prioritized and routed to respond to the most critical applications and users.

Rotech and Osaka Gas are two companies already benefiting from WebSphere Virtual Enterprise. Both companies are using the product to improve application and service performance, ensure business process integrity, decrease time associated with management and maintenance, and reduce energy consumption and costs within the data center.

Rotech, a home healthcare provider based in Orlando, is using WebSphere Virtual Enterprise within its SOA to provide consistent access to treatment programs and health information. In order to achieve this, Rotech needed to eliminate application server failures, which had previously taken up to fifty percent of its staff time. WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provides Rotech with dynamic clustering of application servers, so that service requests can be assessed and deployed according to availability, policy and priority.

“Virtualizing the application infrastructure has helped us eliminate maintenance headaches, improve application performance and simplify management through a single centralized point of control,” said Marlin Clark, Director of Information Systems Technology, Rotech Healthcare Inc. “Not only has WebSphere Virtual Enterprise become an integral part of our SOA strategy, it’s also allowing us to reduce the energy costs associated with running our IT infrastructure. We talked with BEA and IBM, but only IBM showed a commitment to helping us make this level of change.”

Osaka Gas, a leading energy supplier in Japan serving 6.7 million customers, is using WebSphere Virtual Enterprise to enhance application performance and integrate its previously siloed application servers. The company has over 200 enterprise Java applications in a shared services infrastructure. When an application failed, it negatively impacted other applications creating an unstable environment.

To rectify the situation, Osaka Gas enlisted WebSphere Virtual Enterprise to visualize and understand the behavior of its Java applications and implement autonomic control of the infrastructure, while keeping its existing environment unchanged. Osaka Gas saw immediate benefits from WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, including increased application availability and better integration across the business with no impact to their existing systems.

“Virtual Enterprise provided us an entry point for application infrastructure virtualization. Because of the success of this project, we plan to move to a fully virtualized environment as part of our larger SOA strategy,” said Hiroshi Nakauchi, Professional IT Architect and Technical Director, Osaka Gas Information System Research Institute. “We estimate that we’ll be able to reduce our hardware costs significantly now that we’re maximizing workloads on our existing servers.”

Virtualization Improves the Bottom Line

IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise complements server, storage and network virtualization by providing application infrastructure virtualization capabilities that can result in tangible cost savings in reduced hardware and energy costs, reduced administrative operational costs, planned maintenance cost savings, and reduction in unplanned outages.

“Companies with an SOA strategy can drastically improve performance of the infrastructure with WebSphere Virtual Enterprise in ways that translate to tangible financial benefits,” said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere. “Application infrastructure virtualization can be a key component in taking an IT organization to new levels of energy efficiency and brings real value to the business.”

Rotech and Osaka Gas are the newest additions to IBM’s SOA customer base, which numbers more than 6,550 worldwide, representing a fifty percent increase from 2007 to 2008.