Inter Cars, the largest distributor of car spare parts in Central and Eastern Europe, has chosen IBM Power10 to modernize its IT system and achieve additional business benefits. IBM technology guarantees the company at least a 5-year perspective for the development of the central ERP system, even in the scenario of doubling the load.
Inter Cars’ choice of a solution from the IBM portfolio was adequate to the scale of its business and the company’s needs. In 2023, revenues from the sale of Inter Cars SA goods in Poland amounted to PLN 7.27 billion, which means an increase of 13.9% y/y. If this value were related to the 24-hour unavailability of the IT system and the loss of sales revenues, the potential losses would amount to nearly PLN 20 million. Therefore, one of Inter Cars’ main expectations towards the modernization of IT infrastructure was to maintain business continuity and ensure sufficient computing power necessary to achieve business goals.
The implementation was preceded by a detailed analysis of the IT environment in terms of system utilization, problems, applications and processing characteristics, as well as defining expectations regarding data growth. The design of the system also took into account the possibility of quickly creating test and development environments. On this basis, Inter Cars chose the IBM Power E1080 server with IBM All Flash arrays. It is one of the most powerful and scalable servers in the IBM Power portfolio, offering greater flexibility, transparent encryption, higher availability, high scalability and faster analytics thanks to ready-to-use AI.
IBM Power is designed for mission-critical, data-intensive workloads with the highest availability, reliability, security and performance. Additionally, Inter Cars uses the Unix AIX v 7.3 system, the IBM FlashCopy solution to create safe and scalable test and development environments, and IBM Remote Copy to replicate data between data centers. Currently, the company has about 20 such environments and, if necessary, can launch a new, comprehensive environment in less than an hour.
The choice of the IBM Power10 platform helped Inter Cars consolidate its infrastructure and move away from a distributed environment based on two servers for main business operations and an additional few servers for test and development environments to optimize the use of database licenses, with architecture availability of 99.9999%.
We are impressed with the benefits achieved. After modernizing the IT environment, performing the same business operations, waste is reduced by 50% for the same assigned physical resources. This situation creates excellent conditions for further business development. Consolidation allowed us to reduce infrastructure maintenance costs and did not require the purchase of additional database software licenses,” emphasizes Artur Szczepański, Chief Technology Officer at Inter Cars.
Thanks to the changes introduced, the system response time – critical for full automation and real-time tracking of inventory levels – was shortened by 10%. Changes in the IT environment also bring benefits to the end customer of Inter Cars. The high availability of the Inter Cars system and quick restoration in the event of a failure will be appreciated, for example, when a car repair shop works under time pressure and expects the ordering and delivery of parts to take place without delays.
High availability of IT infrastructure plays a key role in the development of the company and securing its revenues. Business practice shows that enterprises rely on the IBM Power10 platform to maintain business continuity and improve security, speed and efficiency. Inter Cars had the same priorities and I am glad that the company entrusted the development of its business to IBM technology and our experts – says Radosław Mańkowski, IBM Infrastructure Expert Labs, solution architect, IBM.
IBM supports company modernization projects using IBM Power. Helps you accelerate speed and innovation with on-premise and multi-cloud environments, while mitigating risk to business resilience with cloud control and data protection optimized for the most stringently regulated industries. Potential benefits also include cost reductions through energy-efficient IT solutions.
Inter Cars chose IBM Power and IBM Flash System technology for the first time in 2012. The following years were used to build relationships and prove that the benefits declared at the sales stage were covered by the implementation and actual operation of the new IBM system.