Appletiser juices up its IT management with CA's Nimsoft

Global beverage company, Appletiser, has deployed CA's Nimsoft Monitor technology with resulting sparkling business benefits.

The successful implementation - which was carried out by CA Southern Africa in just five days - enables Appletiser to monitor its entire IT environment, identify potential problems, and significantly reduce repair time.

Nimsoft, a division of CA, was developed to provide a single, unified solution for monitoring and reporting on the increasingly heterogeneous IT environments used by business. These may include public and private cloud, on-demand software applications, as well as a wide range of mobile devices.

Vincent Rutherford, IT technical manager at Appletiser, says the ability to monitor the entire system in real time means his team has been empowered with a much greater ability to be proactive in the management of the company's technology resources.

"IT is an important business enabler for our enterprise, and is critical for our automated manufacturing systems performance in Elgin - our primary manufacturing plant for local plus some international customers - producing millions of cases of sparkling fruit pleasure annually.

"Nimsoft gives us the ability to identify many performance bottlenecks before they become major problems, and to pinpoint the source of the malfunction very quickly. The solution was implemented at the end of February and our users are already experiencing quicker response times to fault reporting."

He adds that mean time to repair has, on average, declined by up to 50%.

"My team evaluated many toolsets before choosing Nimsoft. Its ability to monitor IBM iSeries servers was a major deciding factor, along with our Intel and network infrastructure in a single product, and quick implementation timeframe," he says.

The initial implementation covers only critical servers and the network; a later phase will include application and database performance. "For now, we are working with CA Southern Africa to identify the reports that will be most useful to us. Overall performance reporting, optimised capacity planning, effective trouble shooting, ultimately delivering optimum service to the business," he says.

IT management is the name of the game, says Steve van der Berg, regional manager, CA Southern Africa. "The Appletiser infrastructure utilises a number of network devices and multiple servers, and serves hundreds of users. It comprises three data centres throughout the country. Nimsoft is easy to use and quick to implement - and the business benefits are immediately apparent."