Case Study: Baldor Electric Company cuts IT costs and boosts SAP capacity with IBM zEnterprise

Baldor integrates new corporate acquisition, cuts IT costs as proportion of sales by 50 percent

Baldor Electric Company, a manufacturer of industrial electric motors and part of the ABB Group, faced a significant challenge following a major acquisition. The integration of 200 new, heterogeneous servers threatened to significantly raise their operational IT costs, contradicting their goal of continually reducing IT expenditure as a proportion of sales revenue. To address this, they turned to vendor IBM for a consolidated infrastructure solution centered on their mainframe technology.

IBM implemented a solution that migrated Baldor's mission-critical SAP environment to more powerful IBM zEnterprise servers, including an EC12 model, and consolidated their storage. This provided a 35% increase in computing capacity without increasing their energy footprint. As a result, Baldor sustained a 60% reduction in energy costs and successfully cut their IT administration costs as a proportion of sales revenue by 50 percent, while also dramatically improving system performance and resilience.

Baldor Electric Company

Mark Shackelford

Vice President of Information Services