HOUSTON: Just as retailers mark the holidays to clear their store shelves, agriculture companies look to the planting season to support sales and growth. Monsanto Company is also relying on BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC – News) Business Service Management (BSM) to keep its IT running during critical seed selling seasons while enabling a large-scale virtualization effort and migration to cloud computing.
Monsanto is a leading global provider of agricultural products designed to improve farm productivity and food quality. The company’s IT staff keeps its systems running for customers during critical periods and supports a significant research and development effort that helps farmers around the world produce more food.
“The first day of the selling season is always exciting for Monsanto as it’s one of the busiest, and we want to be ready to serve our farmer customers,” said Jeff Barks, director of Monsanto solutions planning and engineering. “IT plays a pivotal role in that. Because of the seasonality of our business, we need our systems to work flawlessly during peak periods like the sales and harvest seasons, and we need a reliable IT backbone to support our pipeline research.”
Monsanto selected BMC Software for a large-scale BSM deployment to reduce system downtime by improving the way IT manages changes to the network. The company also is working with BMC Software and the Cisco Unified Computing System to achieve its goal of 70 percent server virtualization as it begins deploying a cloud-based infrastructure that will be the cornerstone of Monsanto’s IT.
“With BMC’s solutions, our customers, like Monsanto, can increase IT reliability while moving toward a fully-managed, dynamically-provisioned cloud environment,” said Kia Behnia, BMC senior vice president and chief technology officer. “The combination of the Cisco Unified Computing System and BMC’s Cloud Service Management allows customers to maximize their hardware utilization and leverage their IT investments in people, processes, tools and policies.”
“The Cisco Unified Computing System offers an open architecture for integration with industry leading management software solutions like BMC BSM,” said Soni Jiandani, vice president, Cisco server access and virtualization group. “Cisco and BMC have collaborated to tightly integrate BMC’s management solutions with UCS, offering a unified architecture to help customers easily migrate to cloud computing.”