Vision Solutions, the leading high availability (HA) solution provider in the IBM System i market, announces that Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company ("Nationwide") has been selected as a finalist for this year's IBM Innovation Awards. The honor is a result of Nationwide's extensive and innovative use of Vision Solutions' award-winning software iTera High Availability.
"We initially installed iTera HA to improve the availability of data at Nationwide and provide a fast, complete recovery in the event of a disaster or system failure," says Matt Campbell, Nationwide systems engineer. "Once the product was installed, other rather unexpected, yet very valuable uses became apparent such as a system migration. By leveraging the iTera HA solution for multiple purposes, we show an even higher return on investment for the software."
Created by IBM and COMMON, the Innovation Awards showcase best practices within the System i market. Winners are selected by a joint panel reviewing the nominations and ranking solutions based on their demonstrated business innovation, support of outstanding achievement, highlighted business value to the company and its end users. Nationwide is a finalist within the Business Resiliency category.
Nationwide, based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the world, with more than $158 billion in assets. The company provides a full range of insurance and financial services, including auto, motorcycle, boat, homeowners, life, commercial insurance, administrative services, health management services, annuities, mortgages, mutual funds, pensions and long-term savings plans.
"We are continuing to use iTera HA as a migration solution to eliminate application downtime," Campbell adds. "While updating our retirement systems application, we completed a significantly large migration with zero impact to the customer because it fell within our normal backup window. We have also used iTera HA in a similar fashion for our claims application and are extremely pleased with the results."
"iTera HA not only reliably supports the mirroring of Nationwide's complex System i application environments, including MQ Series functions, it supports systems migration needs," says Vision Solutions' Chief Technology Officer Alan Arnold. "This allows for important application migrations during normal business hours, minimizing downtime and impact for the application users and minimizing added shifts for IT to implement the projects."
"System i clients are consistently innovative when it comes to driving business value and efficiencyà," said Vision Solutions Executive Vice President, Dan NeVille. "It's exciting to acknowledge those who are developing unique ways to build upon System i's innovative technology."
The IBM product family for System i includes products designed and priced specifically for small and medium businessesùeasy to install and manage, scalable to grow with a business, rich in functionality, and based on open standards to allow integration with existing software and hardware platforms.
IBM's Innovation Award winners will be announced at the upcoming COMMON user group conference in Anaheim, Calif. on April 30, where the world's largest user group of midrange IBM and IBM-compatible information technology enthusiasts gather. The group represents more than 22,000 IT professionals involved with the IBM System i solutions.
About Vision Solutions
Merged with iTera in November 2006, Vision Solutions, Inc., is a leading provider of high availability, disaster recovery, and data management solutions for the System i market.Vision Solutions is one of IBM's largest high availability Premier Business Partners. It is a recognized System i solutions leader with more than 2,700 customers and 12,000 licenses worldwide. The company works closely with an international network of channel partners and IBM to deliver its industry-leading software, along with a powerful portfolio of services and support for protecting mission-critical applications and information from planned and unplanned downtime. Privately held by Thoma Cressey Equity Partners, Vision Solutions has corporate offices in Irvine and Salt Lake City, with offices worldwide. For more information, visit www.visionsolutions.com or call 800.957.4511.
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