Sampoerna Telekomunikasi Indonesia (STI) turns to IBM for asset and service management solutions
Customer Background
Sampoerna Telekomunikasi Indonesia (STI) is the sole licensee of CDMA2000 1X technology at 450 MHz band in Indonesia. Given its technology advantage, STI will first focus on offering telecommunication access to the previously underserved and underprivileged rural markets. Over the next two years, STI will have nationwide coverage, allowing the company to bridge the rural-urban communities. STI is headquartered in Jakarta and has regional offices in all provincial markets across the country.
Business need
Indonesia encompasses over 6,000 inhabited islands; making fixed wireless networks a far superior solution to costly landline networks in terms of physical deployment, capital expenditures for infrastructure and time to market. That was reported about 45.000 villages in Indonesia cannot reached yet by cellular signal.
Looking at the condition, STI business is aiming to provide initially an alternative non-line based communication for villages in Indonesia. They started the business in March 2006 with 16 Base Transceiver Station (BTS) and it is expecting by the end of the year they will have 350 BTSs across Indonesia. To provide excellent services to its customers STI needed to come with solution to monitor their assets infrastructure which scattered around the Indonesian archipelago.
How did IBM win this project?
The opportunity started with discussions around how to maintain their assets by using repeatable tools that help STI optimise and transform their businesses.
As more types of corporate assets are touched by technology, companies are looking for ways to consolidate how they manage their assets – both operational and IT related. IBM’s acquisition of MRO addresses this need by providing customers with a consistent, comprehensive set of asset management solutions and services.
After considering numbers of alternatives, the Head of Application Department confident that IBM/MRO is the best asset management solution to support their expansion business. We offered three asset management software such as EAMS (Enterprise Asset Management System), ITAM (IT Asset Management), and ITSM (For Helpdesk, kind of Remedy). The EAMS is the one that suits STI’s needs. In the course of this project, IBM faced stiff competition from Oracle, an established leader in this field.
Significance of this deal for IBM
Sampoerna Telekom is one of sister companies of Sampoerna Strategic Holding. A new business vehicle of Putera Sampoerna’s family after selling 40 percent of its shares at PT HM Sampoerna Tbk to Phillips Morris, a US tobacco company, valued at Rp18.4 trillion.
With the fast growth of telecommunication industry in Indonesia, this win will put IBM in a good stead to pitch for further opportunities in this space. This service asset and service management solutions implementation will also establish IBM’s presence strongly in the telecommunication space in Indonesia.
For more information concerning this article, please contact Poernawan, Rini ( prini@id.ibm.com ).
Team IBM triumph:
Despite the grueling competition, team IBM was the team of choice due to:
Excellent client coverage and our understanding of STI’ requirements, resulting in our ability to meet and respond swiftly.
Strong relationship with client.
The team behind the win:
Software:
Erwin Sukiato
Husni Fuad
Account Manager: Henry Kuntadi
ACI Fills a Big (Payments) Hole in IBM's Banking Partner Base
Analysis By:Bill Bradway
Founder & Managing Director, Bradway Research, LLC
Implications: This announcement has been a long time in the making for both ACI and IBM. ACI's Base 24-eps fills a large solution hole in the IBM partner directory. Is this a big deal or not? Who are likely to be the winners and losers from this partnership? What is the impact of this announcement on banks?
Analysis: The ACI - IBM announcement is squarely aimed at the ACI installed base of Base 24-atm and Base 24-eft, many of which are running on old Tandem Non-Stop hardware and software (now part of HP). Base 24-eps, the newest version of ACI's retail payments solution family, is the benefactor of this partnership. Base 24-eps is a comprehensive solution suite designed to replace its older applications on a modern IT architecture.
While not a show stopping announcement, there is now a clear, long term commitment from IBM to convince bankers to make a switch to this IBM supported payments solution. Why would bankers make a switch at all? What are the benefits behind Base 24-eps? Which vendors are most likely to be hurt by this partnership?
1. The vast majority of ACI's bank customers are still running its older applications on highly reliable but increasingly obsolete hardware, primarily Tandem's Non Stop servers. These applications need fault tolerant, high availability as they support ATMs and massive EFT and POS networks. ACI has been the biggest vendor in this solution space. Bankers are finding it increasingly difficult and costly to maintain the proprietary Tandem environment. Ultimately, banks will need to reinvest by replacing Base 24-atm and Base 24-eft which operate independently of each other.
2. Base 24-eps combines these two older application solutions and several others into a single platform that runs on the newest IT infrastructure from HP, Sun and now IBM. Banks that adopt Base 24-eps should realize a lower cost, higher value set of capabilities over time. That is the key question: how long will it take to make it worthwhile. Bankers are looking for a 12 month (or better) payback. Some banks have begun this migration and the first wave of ROIs are expected during 2008.
3. This announcement only addressed Base 24-eps. ACI has other solutions that were not covered at this time, particularly ACI Enterprize Banker, its counterpart solution suite for the wholesale banking business. If ACI and IBM had announced that solution too, more upside would be on the table.
4. Of the major industry specific vendors (e.g., Fiserv, Fidelity, and Metavante), not one is seriously by this announcement. In fact, Metavante is probably the biggest Base 24-atm customer. Watch to see if Metavante adopts Base 24-eps on IBM.
5. IBM hopes to take business away from HP and keep Sun out of this business. Pricing is important along with services capabilities for the conversion requirements. IBM's virtualization capabilities may be a deciding factor for banks that are already heavily invested in the IBM zSeries platform.
Five mainframe myths busted
I don't expect this list will change anyone's mind -- but it will certainly make me feel better.
The graying of mainframe support Well, okay, this one is true. I see a lot of gray heads when I look around my department. But in companies with aggressive job rotation programs, I also see a handful of college graduates eagerly taking up the challenge to become excellent systems programmers.
More on mainframe trends:
Mainframe year in review, 2007Is there a mainframe skills shortage?Defining the mainframe's role in next-gen application workloadsIBM recognized this problem years ago and has several outreach programs for getting students' hands dirty on big iron, such as its work with
Share, whose
zNextGen team promotes mainframe skill-building. They also are working with colleges to put more mainframes on campuses.
The mainframe is old technology Virtualization (
VM operating system, PR/SM) and
goal-based performance management (WLM) are just two ideas originating on the mainframe that are now making their way onto the smaller platforms. Even so, Windows and UNIX have a long way to go before they match the bigger boxes' ease of maintenance and sophisticated diagnostic and debugging tools. Furthermore, to this day mainframes remain the industry's gold standard for security and system integrity.
It takes too many people to manage a mainframe Most shops measure tech support staff sizes by drawing a circle around all the mainframe systems programmers and comparing that against the number of Unix system administrators. But that isn't the whole story.
If you look more closely, you'll see the mainframe staff supports more than just the operating system. The same department maintains transaction processors (CICS and IMS), databases (DB2 and DL/1) and programming languages along with a myriad of other products needed to keep the trains running.
A fair comparison should include the administrators who keep the smaller versions of transaction processors (WebSphere), databases (UDB, Oracle and SQL), languages and office tools, to name a few. Taking those technicians into account paints a more accurate picture of how much manpower it takes to keep the small boxes afloat.
Mainframe processors are too expensive The development of mainframe
CMOS processors truly drove the price versus performance graph through the floor. Now, some boxes have more processing power than one instance of the operating system can use, thus requiring customers split their systems into multiple logical partitions (LPAR) to soak the machines. Furthermore, IBM implemented "power on demand" through the use of central processors that are dormant until turned on when needed.
You still have to be careful. Chasing the latest and greatest processor family can be expensive and IBM has successfully shouldered the other hardware vendors out of the business. But there is a healthy and lucrative used processor market that can save a company a lot of money if they don't mind being a generation or two behind.
Lastly, the mainframe's workload management enables it to do two things. First, it can manage a diverse workload, from web back-end to ad-hoc batch jobs, while ensuring each one meets its performance goals. Second, the mainframe is comfortable running up to 90% utilization, something the other platforms can't match even with virtualization. In the Unix world, once utilization tops 50% the answer becomes BAGDS (Buy Another Gol-Durned Server).
Mainframes can't compete in an Internet-driven business world IBM has spent the last ten years heavily investing in software to ensure it can. Today's CICS works quite well as a web site back-end or partner in
service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems. IBM provides
Application Assist Processors (zAAP) for executing Java. Lastly, the mainframe has the distinct advantage of already hosting the systems and information companies want to put on the web so the main challenge becomes how to interface to it. To the rescue are bucketfuls of software that can provide mainframe-based information to the web without changing the original applications.
As I said in the short introduction, I'm probably preaching to the choir. However, there are some myths people outside of the mainframe world believe because they never bother to ask. Then there are the myths we mainframers tell ourselves because we never think to question them. Sometimes you have to challenge received wisdom to do what is right for your company.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: For 24 years, Robert Crawford has worked off and on as a CICS systems programmer. He is experienced in debugging and tuning applications and has written in COBOL, Assembler and C++ using VSAM, DLI and DB2.
