2 page Case Study - Posted 12/28/2007
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Major Landscape Services Company Moves from System i to Windows for J.D. Edwards
When landscape giant ValleyCrest Companies faced a multimillion-dollar expense to continue to use IBM System i to support J.D. Edwards, it knew it needed another solution. That solution: the Windows Server® and SQL Server® products from Microsoft. Hardware and software licensing costs declined 92 percent and a U.S.$300,000 maintenance contract was eliminated, while performance and scalability will help keep the company growing for years.
Business Needs
Like the spreading roots and branches of the millions of trees that it nurtures each year, the business of ValleyCrest Companies has grown continuously and vigorously since its founding more than half a century ago. The national landscape services company serves major public, private, and non-profit customers through 138 offices and six business areas. It’s had double-digit growth for several years and U.S.$1 billion in revenues in the last year.
ValleyCrest has helped to fuel its growth by continually adopting new technology. In 2003, the company was running a major J.D. Edwards World enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment on the IBM System i (formerly AS/400) platform with a DB2 database.
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We’re relying on this technology to support mission-critical functionality throughout our enterprise—we’re betting on Microsoft. We’re very comfortable with that bet. |
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John Johnston
Chief Information Officer, ValleyCrest Companies |
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The solution included 42 J.D. Edwards products, including financials and order processing, and supported the production of 10,000 invoices per month and 10,000 paychecks per week. There were 400 concurrent users and 1,600 named users.
As the System i solution neared the end of its useful life, ValleyCrest faced an unpleasant choice. The original IBM hardware and software had cost U.S.$1.8 million and was running $300,000 per year in maintenance contracts. A new system, to handle the company’s burgeoning business, would up the ante to $3 million in hardware and software, plus maintenance.
“J.D. Edwards was absolutely mission-critical for the running of our business,” says John Johnston, Chief Information Officer, ValleyCrest Companies. “At the same time, the costs we were facing were extremely high. We couldn’t afford to waste resources that could be better invested to provide competitive advantage and grow our business.”
Solution
ValleyCrest Companies found a better way to run J.D. Edwards by turning to Microsoft® technologies. In 2005 it migrated to J.D. Edwards OneWorld version XE and, most recently, to Enterprise One version 8.12. The solution runs on the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system and Microsoft SQL Server® 2000 Enterprise Edition database software, and the company is about to upgrade to the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005.
The company supports this deployment on an HP DL 585 computer with four dual-core processors, and will support the upgraded deployment on an HP DL 580 with four quad-core processors.
Because of the high volume of line-item details in Financials and Payroll, the system is now approaching 1 terabyte in total data even though the company purges aging data every 18 months. A central instance supports the national enterprise, including all timesheet entry, order processing, and paychecks. An expansion to the solution includes the J.D. Edwards human resources module. The company runs 700 custom reports developed in OneWorld, which provide month-end reporting for each subsidiary on financials and sales.
ValleyCrest manages the deployment in part with Microsoft System Center products, including Microsoft Operations Manager, Systems Management Server, and Windows® Software Update Services. It is preparing to deploy Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager as part of its backup and disaster recovery program.
With the upgrade to SQL Server 2005, the company plans to implement active/passive clustering for the SQL Server database and Enterprise One application servers. It also intends to implement SQL Server log-shipping of data to its Dallas, Texas, facility for disaster recovery, and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to create a reporting server for J.D. Edwards reports, minimizing performance drag on the transaction servers.
Benefits
ValleyCrest Companies turned to Microsoft technologies to reduce the costs it was facing with IBM System i and DB2. It has fully met that goal. The Windows-based hardware and Microsoft software licensing for the deployment of J.D. Edwards Enterprise One cost ValleyCrest $250,000—just 8 percent of the $3 million it would have spent for new IBM hardware and software. And because of the easier maintenance for Windows technologies, the company saves the $300,000 it was spending on an annual maintenance contract.
“To put that savings into perspective,” says Johnston, “I can buy my SQL Server software and hardware twice a year for the amount of money I save in maintenance by shutting off the IBM system.”
Lower total cost of ownership is important—but so is scalability and performance. Fortunately, ValleyCrest gets both with Windows Server and SQL Server, according to Hav Mustamandy, Manager of Network Engineering for ValleyCrest Companies.
“To us, scalability and performance means we have the flexibility to grow our infrastructure to meet the growing demands of our company,” says Mustamandy. “Windows Server and SQL Server fully scale to meet these needs much better than our former System i installation. On performance, as measured by report processing times, the Microsoft solution improved performance by a double-digits increase in most cases, and even by orders of magnitude in some cases, compared to the levels we achieved with System i.”
Johnston also praises the product roadmap for Microsoft technology—and the increasing capabilities he sees coming from that roadmap over time.
“Microsoft isn’t just a great solution to support J.D. Edwards today—it’s a great solution providing increasing benefits over time,” he says. “As we upgrade to new product versions, we’ll gain capabilities that increase reliability, increase performance, and make us increasingly productive. We’re relying on this technology to support mission-critical functionality throughout our enterprise—we’re betting on Microsoft. We’re very comfortable with that bet.”
