IBM Honors Its Most Innovative System i Clients

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - 27 Mar 2006: IBM and COMMON announced the five winners of its annual IT Innovation Awards at the COMMON conference in Minneapolis where thousands of System i users gathered today.

The second annual System i Innovation Awards showcased the achievements of clients who use IBM's "all-in-one," open System i platform to deliver IT innovation. The 2006 award winners were: Elie Tahari, Quixtar, Inc., Transworld Entertainment, Bank of America National Association, Canada Branch and Moraine Valley College.

"System i clients consistently strive to be innovative. It is that spirit at the core of the System i platform -- driving business value and efficiency while delivering outstanding availability and automation," said Mark Shearer, IBM System i general manager. "We are pleased to recognize the outstanding achievements of our clients who have found new and exciting ways to build upon the System i's innovative technology to deliver even greater value to their customers."

Here are details on this year's winners:

• Elie Tahari, a leading designer of women's fashions, designed an innovative data warehousing application that supports the company's business management and a customized scorecard application in near-real time, allowing managers at all levels to report on business performance without the delay of manually prepared spreadsheets. Additionally, it allows managers to see all aspects of their world-wide operations to make timely business decisions. The application pulled multiple information systems onto a single System i and earned Elie Tahari the award for Application Deployment.
• Quixtar, Inc., a leading online retailer of health and beauty products, developed a high-availability back-up system that enabled it to achieve high availability for its business applications while meeting customer demand. Quixtar consolidated its environment onto two System i 570s located five miles apart that use Lakeview MIMIX for object and data replication between the systems. Quixtar also relies on IBM WebSphere MQ to relocate inquiries from its Web site so they can be processed by the backup system during peak hours, eliminating downtime. The company received the Innovation Award in the Business Resiliency category.
• Transworld Entertainment, one of the largest specialty music and video retailers in the United States, consolidated its mixed environment of IBM and of other server technology onto a single System i and successfully integrated its business applications onto the platform, simplifying its IT environment and allowing the company to provide better customer service. Transworld's business applications connect to point-of-sale devices that allow retail store employees to post updates and corrections to their store inventories, simplifying Transworld's critical daily operations. Transworld received the award for Infrastructure Simplification.
• Bank of America National Association, Canada Branch integrated all of its business software on i5/OS and increased the number of transactions processed on i5/OS by 115 percent. This reduced its IT maintenance staff requirements by 22 percent and doubled the business revenue of one of its key business units. The bank has trusted the System i and its predecessors to run its in-house-developed business applications for over 20 years and was today honored with the award for i5/OS Leadership.
• Moraine Valley College in Palos Hills, Illinois has continued to provide education on the System i platform and enhance its curriculum to keep pace with the system's growing capabilities. Most recently, the College acquired a new System i5 running Linux to help teach students in an operating systems course. After demonstrating its commitment to System i education for more then 18 years, Moraine Valley College was this year's recipient of the Education Award.

"We introduced the System i Innovation Awards one year ago to recognize, showcase and share best practices among the System i community," said Beverly Russell, COMMON board president. "This year we were impressed by the more than 50 nominations we received and the innovation that was executed on the System i platform by all of the nominees and finalists."

The winners and finalists, honored this evening at an awards ceremony hosted by Mark Shearer, IBM System i general manager, and Beverly Russell, COMMON board president, were chosen by a panel of 25 judges that included IT-industry leaders, analysts, and IBM and COMMON executives. Current IBM System i customers could be nominated by an IBM Business Partner, IBM employee or themselves. Winners represent the United States, Canada and New Zealand.

About COMMON

COMMON is the world's largest users group of midrange IBM and IBM-compatible information technology users. The organization comprises more than 4,000 individual and corporate members. They represent more than 22,000 IT professionals involved with the IBM System i, OS/400 and related solutions.

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