Menzies Distribution has chosen IBM servers to help it deal with a rapid increase in business. New contracts with major publishers mean that the company’s market share has increased by 20 per cent.
It is implementing SAP for Media with the Press Distribution Extension. “Now we find ourselves with a sudden increase in market share and a consequent requirement to react even more quickly to change and establish ourselves all the more firmly as a leader in our business,” said technical services manager Alan Sutherland
“To sustain this, we need total faith in our applications and their underlying infrastructure and its scalability. This means total faith in our infrastructure suppliers. We have chosen IBM because we believe they are the clear market leaders in this arena and we have confidence that they will join us successfully through this massive change.”
The recently expanded operation involves 4,000 employees at 37 branches across the UK with four new depots being added. Menzies now has approximately 43 per cent market share, delivering 4.8 million newspapers (5.1 million on Sundays) and 2.6 million magazines daily to some 26,000 retail customers.
Menzies is currently migrating two applications from Sun Solaris to IBM AIX, a bespoke packing application and an Adobe based distributed printing application and plans to deploy the latest IBM p5 505 Express servers into 22 of its branches from September 2009.
