Press release:

CUSTOMER WIN: Global Shipping Company Dramatically Improves Operational Visibility and Management with BMC Software

ZIM implements Business Service Management to increase availability of business services and cut issue resolution time

JERUSALEM, Aug. 21, 2012 – ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd., one of the world’s largest container shipping companies, has selected BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to implement a comprehensive Business Service Management (BSM) platform, including a new command and control center complete with IT service management (ITSM) and automation capabilities.

ZIM services a global market that includes ports-of-call in more than 120 countries.  The company’s business requires 24/7 IT support and comprehensive monitoring capabilities to track its various shipping solutions.  However, ZIM’s legacy IT platform was dated, disparate, and frequently unable to manage its operational requirements.

This previous inefficiency led ZIM to realize it needed an uninterrupted, consolidated IT management solution to support its growing customer base and business needs.  The company conducted a thorough review of competitive offerings and chose BMC.

“We selected BMC’s Business Service Management platform as part of our strategy to improve service to our users, ensure business continuity and consolidate our IT centers globally,” said David Avni, chief information officer at ZIM. “I am confident that BMC’s commitment to the project, combined with the professional work of the BMC and Matrix consultancy teams, will ensure we meet the challenges according to the aggressive deadlines we have set."

The Challenge

Working with an antiquated IT platform, ZIM was unable to manage its IT needs to meet the demands of its growing business. Managing service to over 120 countries required increased availability of business services, a complete, consolidated view into IT services and faster problem resolution – all from one, unified platform. 

The Solution

Harnessing the benefits of BMC’s complementary solutions, ZIM selected BMC’s BSM platform over various other solutions to effectively manage and schedule its business processes.  Matrix, the leading information technology company in Israel and a strategic partner to BMC, is assisting with the implementation.

Benefits

Using BMC’s BSM solution, ZIM looks forward to:

• Improved real-time visibility into the impact of performance and availability issues across its global operations
• The ability to manage and monitor the effects of operational change and its global shipping assets
• Increased operational efficiency and productivity by automating certain tasks across applications, consoles, audits, logins and data centers

“These solutions will offer a rich, comprehensive set of productivity tools for managing and scheduling business processes,” said Yigal Shachak, BMC divisional manager at Matrix.  “Matrix is proud to partner with BMC to provide support and training to ZIM. This implementation will have significant business impact on ZIM by providing a more customized, efficient technology platform to manage its global IT infrastructure."

ZIM’s BSM platform includes:

• BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite
• BMC BladeLogic Server Automation
• BMC Atrium CMDB
• BMC Atrium Orchestrator
• BMC Control-M Workload Automation
• BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite

For more information about BMC, please visit:

• Follow @bmcsoftware, @ITSM_Guy on Twitter
• Become a fan of BMC on Facebook

Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software.

Business runs better when IT runs at its best. That's why more than 20,000 IT organizations – from the Global 100 to the smallest businesses – in over 120 countries rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. With the leading Business Service Management platform, Cloud Management, and the industry’s broadest choice of IT management solutions, BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

Avnet Electronics Marketing Executive to Present on End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility at Upcoming Supply Chain Events

March 28, 2012 - Avnet Electronics Marketing Executive to Present on End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility at Upcoming Supply Chain Events

PHOENIX -- The landscape of supply chain infrastructure is rapidly changing. To address some of the challenges that companies face today, Lalit Wadhwa, senior vice president, global supply chain operations at Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), will present at two upcoming supply chain industry events. As part of a global company, Avnet Electronics Marketing facilitates the global supply chain – enabling customers to design in one region, and manufacturing for it in another. Using case studies from Avnet customers, Wadhwa will demonstrate ways to obtain accurate cost-to-serve models, as well as ways to utilize collaborative technologies to create greater visibility with the supply chain.

Click to Tweet: Avnet's Lalit Wadhwa to present at two upcoming supply chain events: Supply Chain World http://avnet.me/24203 & http://avnet.me/55140

Lalit Wadhwa

On Tuesday, April 3, 2012, Wadhwa will be presenting at Supply Chain World North America in Miami. His talk, "Leveraging Visibility in Extended Supply Chains to Analyze Total Cost-to-Serve" delves into best-practices and real-world examples of ways to model supply chain activities in order to obtain accurate cost-to-serve pricing. Wadhwa's talk begins at 11:00 a.m. EDT. For more information about this talk, visit the Supply Chain Worldwebsite.

On Wednesday, April 4, 2012, Wadhwa will give a talk at the Aberdeen Supply Chain Management Summit in Chicago. This presentation titled, "End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility and the Use of Collaborative Technologies: An Avnet Case Study," will detail how leveraging collaborative technology can lead to greater visibility and a more efficient supply chain. This talk will take place at 3:30 p.m. CDT in the Zurich Ballroom. For more information, visit the Supply Chain Management Summit website.

Wadhwa noted, "It's both a challenging and an exciting time in supply chain management. New technologies and methodologies are making it easier for companies to create more efficient supply chains than ever before. Avnet's customers rely on our expertise and ability to remain at the forefront of the logistics industry; we take great care to help our customer avoid pitfalls and missteps along the way. These presentations illustrate how Avnet is leveraging our expertise to help our customers deliver the technology of tomorrow — today."

Based in Phoenix, Wadhwa and his team assist Avnet customers seamlessly move their supply chain from one region of the world to another, across multiple sites. He is a 20-year Avnet veteran.

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About Avnet Electronics Marketing
Avnet Electronics Marketing is an operating group of Phoenix-based Avnet, Inc. that serves electronic original equipment manufacturers (EOEMs) and electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers in more than 70 countries, distributing electronic components from leading manufacturers and providing associated design-chain and supply-chain services. The group's website is located atwww.em.avnet.com.

About Avnet, Inc.
Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT), a Fortune 500 company, is one of the largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology serving customers in more than 70 countries worldwide. Avnet accelerates its partners' success by connecting the world's leading technology suppliers with a broad base of more than 100,000 customers by providing cost-effective, value-added services and solutions. For the fiscal year ended July 2, 2011, Avnet generated revenue of $26.5 billion. For more information, visit www.avnet.com.

Oracle Announces Next Generation of Oracle® Health Sciences Clinical Development Analytics

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Oracle Announces Next Generation of Oracle® Health Sciences Clinical Development Analytics

New Features Expand Visibility into Clinical Programs to Help Increase Productivity and Clinical Effectiveness while Helping to Reduce Costs

DIA Annual EuroMeeting, Copenhagen, Denmark – March 27, 2012

News Facts

Focused on helping health sciences organizations increase the productivity and effectiveness of their product development programs, Oracle Health Sciences today introduced the newest version of Oracle® Health Sciences Clinical Development Analytics.

Driven by input from industry partners, the comprehensive business intelligence application includes new functionality that expands visibility into clinical programs and studies, improves the quality and timeliness of clinical trial data and helps to simplify and prioritize the rapidly expanding responsibilities of study managers, clinical data managers, and site monitors.

The enhanced solution helps to increase resource utilization by delivering advanced dashboards specifically tailored to clinical trial roles. It features expanded drill-down functionality and key performance indicators that identify areas requiring action or attention, such as targeting underperforming sites.

The solution enables organizations to merge data from multiple clinical trial sources, providing a unified view across operational systems on a single screen. New de-duplication technology supports reports that combine both clinical operations and data management information to monitor enrollment progress, optimize productivity at site visits and help to reduce monitoring-related travel expenses.

Oracle Health Sciences Clinical Development Analytics also delivers visibility across the entire portfolio of clinical trials, which enables greater insight into subject recruitment and site performance to empower managers and clinical monitors to better target resources to key sites which will help accelerate trial completion.

With more than 100 pre-built reports and over 500 pre-built measurements and attributes for custom reporting, Oracle Health Sciences Clinical Development Analytics can provide immediate business benefit out of the box, while providing an extensible framework for adding additional metrics aligned to targeted business processes.

• To enable anytime, anywhere access, the solution can be used in conjunction with Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile application for Apple iPhone and iPad to give mobile users access to the latest performance management information.

Supporting Quote

“Clinical trial sponsors and their CRO partners, navigating increasingly complex and lengthy development cycles, are intently focused on improving data quality and clinical program productivity while reducing costs,” said Neil de Crescenzo, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Health Sciences. “The newest version of Oracle Health Sciences Clinical Development Analytics, which features integrated content, expanded dashboards, and optimized reporting, delivers the insight that study sponsors, managers, and monitors require to achieve these goals and accelerate the delivery of new products to the market.”

Supporting Resources

Oracle in Health Sciences

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Join the Oracle Health Sciences Community on Facebook

Oracle Health Sciences on YouTube

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center.  For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.

About Oracle in Industries

Oracle industry solutions leverage the company’s best-in-class portfolio of products to address complex business processes relevant to health sciences, helping speed time to market, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge.

Trademark

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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Shift in Enterprise Cloud Adoption

IBM Addresses Next Shift in Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Study finds nearly 90 percent of businesses are moving beyond virtualization
New IBM SmartCloud software advances visibility, control and automation across cloud and traditional environments
IBM extends secure cloud management to Mobile devices and physical assets

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PULSE -- LAS VEGAS - 06 Mar 2012: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled new software that represents a significant advancement in the level of visibility, control and automation for organizations to securely manage and deploy cloud services.

A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 90 percent of organizations expect to adopt or substantially deploy a cloud model in the next three years.  As organizations take the next step beyond virtualized data centers and expand their cloud environments, they are faced with what has become known as “virtual image sprawl.”  

Virtual images are typically between five to 20 gigabytes in size. Multiply that by the thousands of virtual images created today, with larger enterprises having five to twenty thousand virtual machines, making it costly and challenging for IT managers who are tasked with improving service levels. 

“Virtual images are tripling every two years, outpacing the doubling in compute power and essentially flat IT budgets. With current operating practices, every two years, you'd need 1.5 times the physical infrastructure to support cloud and twice the labor. That's an unsustainable cost and management problem which is the exact opposite of the promise of cloud," said Daniel Sabbah, general manager, IBM Tivoli Software. “We are delivering a much higher level of control over cloud service delivery allowing our customers to quickly, easily and affordably move to higher levels of value beyond virtualization.” 

IBM’s new SmartCloud Foundation offerings allow organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with a higher level of control than previously available in the industry. Collectively, the new offerings will help clients speed delivery, lower risk and better control the move to deploy cloud alongside their existing production environments. 

Increasing Speed  

IBM is offering clients great value and flexibility by delivering best practice cloud services. Since deploying IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, Dutch Cloud has seen its client base expand significantly. However, the high degree of automation built into the IBM solution has greatly reduced Dutch Cloud’s administrative workload.  

Now the IT team spends 80 percent of its time on client migrations and only 20 percent of its time on administration—a more than 70 percent decrease in administrative time. Dutch Cloud’s monthly recurring revenue has tripled twice in the last six months but their operational costs have remained flat. 

“With our original tool, it could take almost an hour to provision an extra 200 virtual machines for a client,” says Martijn Van Zoeren, CEO, Dutch Cloud. “With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, we can do it within five minutes. Previously, we had to keep changing our tool to support all new versions of VMware, KVM and Microsoft software coming out, and all the new storage versions,” added Van Zoeren. “It was easy to do that when we first started, but we couldn’t maintain it as we grew. We were spending 80 percent of our time maintaining the tool and 20 percent on supporting client requirements.” 

With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, new services also can be deployed in minutes rather than hours. This places Dutch Cloud in an ideal position to respond rapidly to fluctuating client needs. The IaaS market is going to continue to mature and we’ll see more competition in the coming years. Our technology choices have given us the ability to thrive in this competitive market.” 

Improving Quality

As enterprises look to accelerate delivery and realize agility, many are starting their cloud implementation journey around their development, test and deployment operations. SunTrust bank is working with IBM’s DevOps solution to increase their business agility while increasing operational discipline, quality, customer satisfaction and governance. Utilizing a cloud environment, SunTrust developers have been able to achieve application build times up to five times faster. 

Building on that and other experiences with clients, IBM will be releasing new capabilities with IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery. The new software is a suite of best practice patterns for enabling integrated lifecycle management of cloud services, combining Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management solutions with IBM SmartCloud Provsioning. The recent Green Hat acquisition will further extend these capabilities reducing development lifecycle times by streamlining test cycles as applications are transitioned to cloud deployments. 

Clients using the software have seen dramatic results, including: 

·   Shortened delivery time from months to days through end-to-end automation, standardization and repeatability 

·   20 percent reduction in resource costs while increasing predictability of deployments through low touch and self-service 

·   40 percent more agility by streamlining operation and development collaboration with in-context communication 

·   20 percent increases in application service availability and performance by improving stakeholder alignment of development, test and ops

Reducing Risk, Controlling Complexity

Enterprises view cloud computing as a way to improve responsiveness and change the economics of IT. At the same time, the envelope of IT is stretching way beyond the data center, networks and workstations to new classes of mobile assets with embedded intelligence. 

Clients need to exert the same control over this virtualized, distributed world as they would exert over prior models of IT. In order to address this IBM has launched new offerings, including: 

· IBM SmartCloud Control Desk provides organizations the ability to maintain configuration integrity in response to planned changes and unplanned incidents and problems occuring across a complex IT landscape to ensure continuity of service, speed of response, and efficiency of management.  

· IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices helps firms better manage and secure their mobile environments, including iPhone, iPad, Android-based phones and tablets, Windows Phone and Nokia Symbian devices. With the ability to install in minutes, organizations will quickly be able to remotely set policies, monitor employees’ devices to identify potential data compromise and wipe data off the devices if they are lost or stolen.  

By leveraging key innovations in cloud environment capacity analytics, storage utilization and optimization, operations teams can shift their focus from managing environment bottlenecks to delivering innovative best of breed services. IBM is offering:

· IBM SmartCloud Monitoring enables cloud administrators to maximize cloud availability and utilization by monitoring virtual infrastructures and applying analytics to optimize workload placement.

· IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center improves the flexibility, cost, utilization and performance of storage with automated administration, management and provisioning controls.

About IBM Cloud Computing

IBM has helped thousands of clients adopt cloud models and manages millions of cloud based transactions every day. IBM assists clients in areas as diverse as banking, communications, healthcare and government to build their own clouds or securely tap into IBM cloud-based business and infrastructure services. IBM is unique in bringing together key cloud technologies, deep process knowledge, a broad portfolio of cloud solutions, and a network of global delivery centers. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visithttp://www.ibm.com/smartcloud.  Follow us on Twitter at @ibmcloud.

Cisco Extends Context-Based Security to the World\'s Most Widely Deployed Firewall for Unprecedented Visibility and Control

Cisco Extends Context-Based Security to the World\'s Most Widely Deployed Firewall for Unprecedented Visibility and Control