On-demand gear change for BMW

European car manufacturer BMW has decided to move its email system to an on-demand infrastructure, following a successful trial earlier this year.

The multi-million euro deal, about to be signed with an as yet unnamed IT supplier, will see its ageing email and calendar architecture for its 60,000 staff around the world updated to the latest Microsoft environment.

'We are preparing the first pilot and looking forward to the rollout next year,' said BMW chief information officer Jrgen Maidl.

The carmaker plans to have moved its decade-old email architecture to a pay-as-you-use Microsoft Exchange/Outlook environment by the middle of 2005.

'With the new system, we only pay for what we use, which gives us a lot of flexibility. If we connect users, we pay for them, and if we disconnect users, we stop paying for them,' said Maidl.

The deal also allows BMW to adjust its mailbox sizes up and down, dynamically choosing between various size ranges and only paying accordingly.

It follows a successful storage on demand pilot project with HP earlier this year, which allowed the car maker to easily scale its storage requirements as it needed, paying only for what it uses.

Maidl says the Microsoft environment was the best fit for its current architecture strategy, providing good connectivity for mobile users and strong integration with the Office suite that the company uses.

'We have a lot of PDA-level management tools being used by our staff in plants and assembly environments. Microsoft provides very smooth connectivity for us,' said Maidl.

The chosen supplier will conduct a phased email rollout to users, starting from the first quarter of next year and ending in early 2005, at which time a new calendar system will be rolled out globally in a 'big bang' operation.

The company is currently running HP's OpenMail with a Netscape client and a propriety calendar product.

'This is very early stuff, but it was on top of the heap when we decided in 1994 to use it.'

The whole rollout, maintenance and operation of the environment will be done by the firm's IT partner, with whom BMW has established a memorandum of understanding, but is unable to name as yet.