Wolters Kluwer Italia - Novell Customer Success Video

With more than 19,000 employees on three continents, Wolters Kluwer is a major international publisher of information, tools and solutions designed to help professionals make the right decisions and improve their productivity. Its Italian division, Wolters Kluwer Italia, has 1,150 employees engaged in delivering solutions to accountants, tax consultants and lawyers.

Challenge
Wolters Kluwer Italia relies on a suite of SAP applications to provide support for its core business processes in financial accounting, management control, sales and distribution, contract management, human resources and business intelligence.

The business was growing rapidly, and the existing SAP systems were beginning to show their age. Wolters Kluwer Italia chose to upgrade to a more recent release of the SAP software to take advantage of new functionality. The company decided to use this upgrade as an opportunity to review its entire IT infrastructure and decide on the best strategic direction.

"Our top priorities were scalability, flexibility and reliability," said Carlo Capalbo, CTO of Wolters Kluwer Italia."In addition, we wanted to consolidate our physical infrastructure as far as possible, to keep operational costs low. Virtualisation was a clear way to meet these objectives—but there are many virtualisation technologies available, and we needed to be sure that we were making the right choice for our business."

Novell Solution
Wolters Kluwer Italia evaluated a number of different hardware and software technologies before making its decision

"Prior to this project, our SAP applications were running on proprietary hardware," said Capalbo."We were keen to avoid vendor lock-in in future, so we started considering open source options for the operating system. It was crucial to find a solution that was fully certified by SAP—and a vendor that could provide enterprise-level support."

Of the open source operating systems certified by SAP, Wolters Kluwer Italia was most impressed by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

"SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has always been a highly reliable operating system that delivers excellent performance," said Capalbo."The inclusion of Xen virtualisation technology made it an ideal choice of platform for our SAP environment, as it facilitates the creation and management of the numerous production, development and quality assurance servers that SAP requires."

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Novell
• Wolters Kluwer
• Suse Linux
• SAP