Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced the 2007 Visionary Awards winners. These IT leaders from around the world are recognized for their innovative use of Symantec solutions to protect their infrastructure and information. From securing the infrastructure of one of the world's largest oil companies to protecting hospital systems for the delivery of top notch patient care to keeping customers’ financial data available, these customers are leveraging technology to drive true business results. Representing a wide range of industries and geographies, the winners of the 2007 Visionary Award include IT leaders from Baptist Health South Florida, Chevron Information Technology Co., GE Global Infrastructure Services, Honeywell Aerospace, ING Investment Management Group, The Netherlands Ministry of Defence, Sistema Usiminas and Wipro Limited.
“As the global economy continues to expand and interactions become increasingly interconnected, companies must take the right measures to minimize their exposure to risk and increase IT efficiency,” said John W. Thompson, chairman and CEO, Symantec. “This year’s Visionary Award winners have demonstrated their success leveraging Symantec technology to protect their information and systems.”
Baptist Health South Florida Leverages IT to Support High Quality Care
Allen Montgomery, director of information technology at Baptist Health South Florida, South Florida’s largest not-for-profit healthcare organization, is recognized for implementing comprehensive data center management and enterprise storage solutions to help improve patient care while improving IT efficiency. Baptist Health implemented a remote ICU monitoring application using Veritas Cluster Server, which contributed to a 27 percent decrease in ICU mortality rates.
Montgomery’s team deployed Symantec software for a backup and recovery system that saves more than $7.5 million annually, and using the same solution as the basis for a storage consolidation initiative, saved more than $1 million in hardware and IT labor costs. The team’s implementation also helps ensure systems are compliant with IT policies, reducing the preparation time of monthly security audits from 12 hours to just 15 minutes.
Chevron Information Technology Co. Strengthens Enterprise Security to Ensure IT Compliance Rich Jackson, general manager of Chevron’s Global Information Risk Management unit is recognized for improving Chevron’s enterprise security posture to ensure the company’s heterogeneous and global IT infrastructure complies with government regulations and industry standards. As part of the second largest integrated energy company in the United States, Jackson’s team launched an Information Compliance Automation System initiative to standardize and automate its diverse compliance and audit processes. Using Symantec software as the foundation of its compliance framework, Chevron launched a three-year plan to improve information protection processes, optimize the use of enterprise resources and improve enterprise security. With the rollout still in progress, Jackson expects a 50 per cent improvement in operational efficiency, representing total savings of more than $12 million on audit and compliance costs.
GE Global Infrastructure Services Boosts Storage Availability with Symantec
Gary Scott, senior architect and team leader for GE Global Infrastructure Services (GE GIS), a corporate component of the Fortune 10 Company General Electric, is recognized for reducing IT costs through data center standardization and the implementation of a storage management solution. Standardization is a key initiative for Scott and his team, whose responsibility is the management of the company’s server infrastructure, which includes more than 2,200 servers located across the globe. Leveraging Veritas Storage Foundation, Cluster Server and CommandCentral Storage, Scott’s team recovered five terabytes of production storage to the business, representing immediate cost savings of $200,000, while increasing ongoing billable storage availability by 45 percent. Despite its heterogeneous environment, software infrastructure standardization is also helping GE GIS ensure confidence in application availability, maintaining uptime ratings across all platforms of at least 98 percent.
ING Investment Management Group drives down Data Storage costs with Symantec Mark Kolodzej, vice president of IT and head of the infrastructure services department at ING Investment Management Group, is recognized for leveraging technology to ensure confidence in the integrity of client communications while reducing data storage costs. The solution also includes a tiered storage model designed to optimize storage utilization and availability, which is expected to save more than $1 million in storage hardware cost avoidance over the next three years. The team’s implementation has already resulted in more than $300,000 in annual IT labor cost and end-user productivity savings. As the principal asset management division of one of the world’s largest financial services corporations, e-mail security and compliance are high priorities.
Kolodzej and his team deployed Symantec Enterprise Vault for e-mail and discovery, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in e-mail and file system storage requirements.
The Netherlands Ministry of Defence Secures E-mail Communication While Reducing Costs
Albert-Jan Boer, senior manager of communication services for the Defence Telematics Organisation, the IT supplier for the Ministry of Defence, is recognized for ensuring the availability and integrity of e-mail communications supporting more than 65,000 civilian and military employees in the Dutch armed forces. Since e-mail is essential to national security, Boer’s team must meet service level agreements (SLAs) that require rapid restoration of the e-mail system after a failure. Boer and his team implemented Symantec Enterprise Vault, which not only ensures that SLAs are met, but has also resulted in significant cost savings, cost avoidance and productivity improvements. The Ministry of Defence projects labor cost savings of more than $1 million over the next three years because its Intelligence Group can conduct e-discovery without IT assistance.
Honeywell Aerospace Utilizes Symantec for Consolidation Efforts
Theo Gibson, director of infrastructure at Honeywell Aerospace, is recognized for utilizing technology to protect the company’s IT infrastructure and improve data center and application availability. A global provider of products and services for aviation and aerospace applications, Honeywell Aerospace’s data center infrastructure supports more than 1,500 applications and 35,000 employees.
Sistema Usiminas Standardizes Enterprise Security to Manage Compliance
Gilmar Ribeiro, information security manager for Sistema Usiminas, Latin America’s largest producer of flat steel and one of the world’s top 20 steel makers, is recognized for standardizing on an enterprise security solution to protect the company’s data network and ensure compliance across its diverse infrastructure. With Symantec endpoint protection products, Ribeiro and his team have nearly eliminated malware-related downtime and reduced incoming mail for the company’s 40,000 employees by 65 percent through more effective spam filtering.
Using Symantec Control Compliance Suite, Ribeiro’s team simplified several manual processes into a single automated reporting console to help enforce security compliance, while reducing preparation time for compliance audits by 50 percent.
Wipro Limited Upgrades IT Infrastructure with Symantec
Laxman Badiga, corporate vice president and CIO of Wipro Limited, one of the top global providers of IT services, outsourced R&D, infrastructure outsourcing, business process services and consulting, is recognized for delivering operational efficiencies for compliance, information risk management and data center standardization. Badiga and his team are in the process of implementing a compliance solution based on Symantec software to automate and ensure IT compliance while optimizing e-mail archiving and discovery, which on completion expected to reduce audit preparation time by 20 to 30 percent.
Standardizing on Veritas Data Center Foundation for the management of storage, servers and application performance, Badiga’s team improved employee productivity by nearly 30 percent and reduced e-mail storage requirements by 20 percent. With improvements in the data center, Badiga’s team has been able to accelerate the data backup process, cutting the backup window in half.
About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance and performance. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com
