Customer Case Study
Bertelsmann AG
4/21/2006
Bertelsmann Software Migrates from Mainframe to Windows, Supports 20 Million Customers
In 2002, Bertelsmann AG achieved U.S.$1 million annual cost savings by moving the management of some of its book clubs off a mainframe and onto a Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003-based solution. In 2005, when its largest club considered joining the move to the Windows® operating system, Bertelsmann needed to know that the Windows port of its mainframe software could handle 60,000 screen requests per hour by 1,000 call center operators—much more than the earlier migrated system was handling in production. A benchmark test simulating 20 million customers in real-world scenarios, conducted at the Microsoft Technology Center in Munich with the participation of Micro Focus and Unisys, supported 170,000 screen requests by 1,500 operators—far above the benchmark goals—plus another 51,000 orders and 130,000 payments in simultaneous batch processing. The system can easily scale to support additional needs.
Industry: Recreation
Size: Large, 88000 employees
Country: Germany  Germany

Customer Profile
http://www.bertelsmann.com/
Gütersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann AG is one of the world's largest media companies. The company has 88,500 employees worldwide.
Business Situation
Bertelsmann had migrated from a mainframe application to the Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system to run many of its book clubs and wanted to know if the solution would scale up to support its largest club.
Solution
Bertelsmann turned to the Microsoft Technology Center, Micro Focus, and Unisys for benchmark testing of its Windows®-based solution on a 2.8-GHz, 4-processor system.
Benefit
  • Supports 20 million customers
  • Supports 1,500 call center operators, 50 percent above goal
  • Enables 170,000 screen I/Os per hour, 200 percent above goal
  • Supports parallel batch and transaction processing with negligible performance effect
Software
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition
Quote
"The test configurations were able to run large batch processes in a stable, reliable, and well-performing way. Moreover, mostly only two of the four available CPUs were used. This provides a lot of possibilities to optimize the duration times."
Günter Bodner,
Chief Information Officer, ICS Bertelsmann