Major Italian Cooperative Selects CA's Unicenter TNG For Control And Management Of Distributed It Environment

Business Wire, March 22, 1999

BASIGLIO, Italy--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 1999--

COOP Lombardia Cites Comprehensive Management Features

And Price-Performance Ratio As Key Factors In Choosing CA

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that COOP Lombardia, one of the largest Italian cooperatives operating in the food and non-food distribution and retail market, has chosen Unicenter TNG as its enterprise management solution. The company will deploy Unicenter TNG for comprehensive management and control of its complex, geographically dispersed IT infrastructure.

Established in 1984 when cooperatives Unicoop Lombardia, UCC di Cremona and Consorzio di Pieve Emanuele were merged, COOP Lombardia today runs 37 supermarkets and 4 hypermarkets encompassing more than 3,000 employees and 259,000 members. COOP Lombardia is active in retail sales through supermarkets and larger hypermarkets. The company is also a wholesaler and manages the distribution centers which supply the 41 COOP supermarkets and hypermarkets as well as 80 small cooperatives operating throughout Northern Italy. Revenue for 1998 is expected to reach Lit. 1,578bn (U.S. $889 million).

To maintain its competitive edge, COOP Lombardia is focusing on two specific goals: improving relationships with its customers and members, and increasing its competitiveness by seeking out synergies with other cooperatives located in various parts of Italy.

To meet these objectives, COOP Lombardia made the decision to move from a centralized environment to a distributed one. This change involves developing communications with remote stores and sites, in terms of networks and systems, as well as using an enterprise management solution. After evaluating its previous IT environment, the company came to the conclusion that it needed to upgrade its technology to handle expected growth and to better compete in the business environment both today and moving forward.

"When we identified the need to develop and improve communications with our stores, we evaluated all the main systems and network management solutions available on the market, especially considering price-performance ratio," said Oliviero Kokosar, IT manager at COOP Lombardia.

The company found Unicenter TNG to be the ideal solution to meet the requirements of its complex, distributed network.

"Not only does Unicenter TNG provide full capability to cover all the functional areas of interest to us, it also allows us to continue to use a wide range of platforms and operating systems," said Kokosar. "Our extensive evaluation confirmed that CA's software was clearly the best solution available to meet all our technology needs."

The strategic choice made by COOP Lombardia allows the company to maintain its 40 UNIX servers dedicated to management applications and the 7 NT servers used for communications applications. The cooperative's IT environment also includes about 150 Windows 95 clients using Oracle DBMS, which is also managed by Unicenter TNG.

With Unicenter TNG, COOP Lombardia expects to improve the management and control of its networks and systems while significantly reducing outside technical staff currently involved in help desk and retrofitting activities. Unicenter TNG will optimize software distribution through central management, thus avoiding the need for time-consuming and expensive installations at the local level.

COOP Lombardia is specifically leveraging Unicenter TNG components such as Business Process Views, Real World Interface, 2-D, Network Monitoring/Management, Event Management, Workload Scheduling, Security and Software Distribution.

These components are expected to help COOP Lombardia:

-- collect messages on a single console, thus responding promptly and

increasing efficiency in systems management; -- optimize batch processes through event management; -- improve security on UNIX systems; -- save money and time through automatic software distribution.

"The business goals of a company such as COOP Lombardia are very demanding due to its special organizational structure," said Carlo D'Andrea, managing director of Computer Associates Italy. "For this reason, a flexible management solution such as Unicenter TNG will provide real support and bring true value to all areas of the company's business."

By automatically managing the enterprise computing environment, Unicenter TNG optimizes the availability of business-critical services to help reduce the total cost of ownership. Enterprise assets including the Internet/intranet and even non-IT equipment, like automated teller machines, can be managed based on the business processes they support. Comprehensive and integrated out-of-the-box functionality, an intuitive Real World Interface, and self-learning, predictive neural network Neugents technology make Unicenter TNG easy to deploy and use, resulting in a rapid return on investment that increases over time.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), the world leader in mission-critical business computing, provides software, support and integration services in more than 100 countries around the world. CA has more than 13,000 employees and had revenue of $5.1 billion in calendar year 1998.