Vendor Spotlight:

IBM AND LEGO COMPANY BUILD FOR SUCCESS

IBM announced a major deal with LEGO Company, the Danish-based leading manufacturer of play materials. Central to the new partnership is IBM's e- business on demand capabilities that will allow the company to significantly reduce the cost of running its IT-infrastructure. A solution that allows the LEGO Company to adjust IT capacity needs to seasonal peaks in business demand.

The deal, which is one of the first full-scale European e-business on demand infrastructure solutions from IBM, represents a decision for the LEGO Company to work with IBM globally as a strategic IT partner. Reassessing its IT requirements based on the need for an alignment between business and IT, the LEGO Company went looking for a partner that could offer flexible costs with an innovative IT usage model that allowed the company to only pay for what it used. Spare capacity being constantly available for peak surges in customer demand.

Driven by a wish to lower costs and increase productivity, the LEGO Company will consolidate its IT platform from over 220 severs from HP and Compaq to a fully integrated, open infrastructure using IBM's leading Unix eServer pSeries p690 (2) and p650 (4), eServer xSeries x440 (24) and IBM Shark Storage SAN servers (4). The deal also includes Tivoli Storage Manager software. The IBM solution not only reduced the total amount of servers by a factor of seven but significantly provided new levels of business flexibility by allowing dynamic addition and reallocation of processing and storage capacity according to varying business volumes and priorities. The LEGO Company was able to purchase fully configured server and storage systems at a fraction of the total cost and have the opportunity to turn on additional capacity when required, but, equally important, be able to turn off capacity again. This offering is part of IBM's popular "pay as you grow" strategy.

"We are operating in a very competitive environment and need to respond to the dynamics of our market at a moment's notice," said Hal Yarbrough, senior director, Global IT, LEGO Company. "The IBM solution allowed us to drastically reduce the number of servers and storage units we have across the business, which is clearly a positive benefit. However, the key reason for going with IBM was the flexibility their solution offered. IBM was able to provide an on-demand solution that matched our business needs for a cohesive, worldwide IT infrastructure, that adapts itself to our very cyclical business and need for rapid introduction of new products".

LEGO Company, the only European manufacturer listed in the world's top ten best selling toys, is competing in an incredibly dynamic market place where demand for its products widely fluctuates impacted by seasonal peaks such as the pre-Christmas purchasing rush and large scale marketing thrusts. The new flexible solution will allow the company to more easily set up new projects and test their viability without major investments in new systems.

"We are very excited to work with the LEGO Company and see this as a great milestone in our mission to deliver e-business on demand solutions to our customers. Our commitment to the LEGO Company is to enable them to get a competitive advantage in the market by delivering a solution that takes their infrastructure to new levels of integration and productivity by delivering computing power as and when their business demanded it" said Lars Stanley Nielsen, Director of Systems Sales, IBM Nordic.

About IBM

International Business Machines Corporation, head quartered in Armonk, N.Y., is the world's largest information technology company. IBM is the biggest provider of IT services ($36B), hardware ($27B) and rental and financing ($3B). The company has approximately 325,000 employees and conducts business in 170 countries. 2002 revenues were $81 billion.

Information on IBM eServer is available at http://www.ibm.com/eserver. IBM news releases and fact sheets are available at http://www.ibm.com.