Tidal Software announced that Albany International Corp. is deploying Tidal solutions to assist in the rollout and to automate the ongoing operation of its new worldwide implementation of SAP.

Albany is consolidating all worldwide data center operations onto a global implementation of SAP’s ERP solution. The consolidated solution is targeted not only at IT cost savings, but also at providing better support of global operations for the company.

“We are pulling together all our business units onto a single ERP instance based on SAP,” said Barry Duncan, Director, IT & Development at Albany International Corp. “We’re integrating certain manufacturing applications, such as shop floor automation and CRM, with Microsoft .NET applications through SOA and Web Services. The result is a system that provides better planning and support for the operation of the business. We turned to Tidal to ensure that this consolidated system would deliver the consistent level of service our users expect and need.”

Key to the project’s success is the ability to proactively maintain consistent service levels in the face of significant changes in the infrastructure and consolidation of all users onto a single system. Albany chose Tidal for its complete SAP coverage, integration with Microsoft solutions, and, most importantly, Tidal’s integrated scheduling and performance management that automatically detects the earliest signs of potential problems for proactive service level management.

“Performance is going to be extremely important to us,” said Duncan. “We need to monitor and react very quickly to performance issues before they become a problem. It’s important from a consolidation standpoint. In a consolidated environment there are no localized or isolated problems. We’re going to have many more users on the system, so a lot more people will notice if things get slow.”

Albany

is utilizing the entire Tidal suite of SAP performance and scheduling products. Tidal Enterprise Scheduler is providing the scheduling of jobs in the multiple SAP instances used for development, test, and production environments. Tidal Horizon for SAP Solutions and Tidal Transaction Analyzer are providing the real-time and historic performance management for proactive detection and diagnosis of problems and analysis and reporting on service levels of the system. All information from the Tidal suite will be routed to Microsoft SCOM, which is utilized for all monitoring of operations in the data center.

“We are undergoing a tremendous amount of change,” said Duncan. “Implementing SAP is huge, and we’ve been centralizing our data services and upgrading our network as well. When you have that much change, it’s important to understand the performance issues as they arise to diagnose issues quickly and correctly. Tidal’s intelligent approach to automation gives us the opportunity to head off problems proactively, which gives us more control of our day. And that proactive response gives our user base more trust in our computing model and in what we are doing.”

The integration between Tidal’s scheduling and performance solutions, Tidal ASAP, will provide Albany the opportunity to automate the response to performance problems caused by excess or conflicting demands on the system. Tidal ASAP can automatically assess where various processes are competing for resources and take action in changing priorities in jobs or allocation of resources.

“Everyone is trying to do more with less,” said Duncan. “You need to automate processes to relieve your staff from some of the more mundane or time-consuming tasks. The benefit of the Tidal solution is that we can use the Enterprise Scheduler in combination with Horizon and Transaction Analyzer to do just that. If we can utilize a program’s logic to automate a process, we don’t have to have an administrator or operations personnel sitting at a console. That means less time fighting fires and more time on our strategic projects.”

“Albany International’s approach to datacenter consolidation and automation is systematic and disciplined. All businesses undertaking these same efforts can learn a great deal from Albany’s approach,” said Rod Butters, Tidal’s senior vice president of marketing. “We are pleased to be such an integral part of their initiative and are committed to delivering products that increase the automation of the data center for all our customers.”