CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Major European IT Services Provider Reduces IMS Downtime with BMC Software

BITMARCK TECHNIK GMBH, a leading European IT services provider serving the health insurance sector, has successfully standardized on best practice IMS solutions from BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC) – integrating a previously fragmented IMS toolset, maximizing availability and in the process avoiding an outage that could have cost the company €606,000 ($829,000).

A BMC customer for 13 years, BITMARCK – formerly known as DAK IT – initially deployed tools to support IMS data and systems. Gradually, over the years, BITMARCK has introduced BMC’s mainframe automation solutions BMC DELTA PLUS for DBCTL, BMC Log Analyzer for IMS and BMC MAXM Reorg/Online for IMS to maintain and protect data, optimize the performance and availability of its critical applications, ensure data integrity and manage costs.

"The main reason for standardizing on BMC is the quality of its solutions. They’re stable, fast and easy to use. Compared with IBM’s IMS tools, the BMC solutions are unbeatable,” said Sven Ruhnke, IT manager at BITMARCK. "The support we receive from BMC is also first-class.”

BITMARCK supports highly-critical applications for high-profile clients in the health insurance industry, such as DAK, Germany’s second-largest health insurance society with 6.5 million insured customers. If the IMS databases that support these applications were disorganized or damaged, performance and availability would suffer. BMC mitigates risk by ensuring all changes are made with integrity, and availability is improved by completing maintenance with minimal or no outages.

"BMC is critical to our business. If the applications became unavailable, then insurance policies, claims information and other policy data would cease to be available, with almost unimaginable consequences,” said Thomas Trautmann, database administrator at BITMARCK. "A corrupt database causing an eight-hour outage would result in a penalty of more than €600,000 ($820,600) for breach of service level agreements – a situation that, thanks to BMC, we recently managed to avoid.”

The data in BITMARCK’s IMS database system was migrated to IMS High Availability Large Database (HALDB) to allow databases to scale to multiple terabytes. In this environment, the BMC MAXM Reorg/Online for IMS solution is used to eliminate downtime for performance-related reorganizations, dramatically reducing outages.

"BITMARCK operates in an industry built on critical information and a rock solid foundation of best practice business management software is crucial,” said Nick Glover, BMC’s vice president of EMEA Sales and Services for Mainframe Service Management. "Downtime is simply unacceptable. BMC is helping BITMARCK closely maximize uptime and manage risk – important functions for all IT departments.”

A written case study about BITMARCK can be found at the following link.

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