Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Large Enterprise Business


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"We´re running one of the world´s largest single global instances of SAP ERP on Windows. Air Products is the only global industrial gas supplier running its business on this architectural platform…this provides us with an unparalleled ability to interact with our global customers and suppliers in a common, efficient fashion regardless of where they are located. By migrating to HP Integrity servers with Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and Microsoft® Windows®, we've created a much more agile, cost-effective infrastructure that combines the performance and reliability of our previous mainframe platform with the benefits of a standards-based solution. Our scalable, cost-effective, and energy-efficient Integrity servers are allowing us to expand our SAP solution to take advantage of the tremendous growth in our Asia branches.”

-Bob Elward, Director, Client / Server Engineering, Global IT Infrastructure Services, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Customer Profile

Air Products (NYSE:APD) serves customers in industrial, energy, technology, and healthcare markets worldwide with a unique portfolio of atmospheric gases, process and specialty gases, performance materials, and equipment and services. Founded in 1940, Air Products has built leading positions in key growth markets such as semiconductor materials, refinery hydrogen, home healthcare services, natural gas liquefaction, and advanced coatings and adhesives. The company is recognized for its innovative culture, operational excellence, and commitment to safety and the environment, and is listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability and FTSE4Good Indices. The company has annual revenues approaching $10 billion, operations in over 40 countries, and over 20,000 employees around the globe.

Learn more about Air Products

Business Situation

Air Products’ initial implementation of SAP began in 2001 and by 2007 had expanded to encompass more than 75% of its business revenue. A single instance strategy was chosen to drive consistent business processes across the Corporation in what had traditionally been a very regionally managed business model. The next expansion of the SAP implementation for the Corporation was into Asia which dictated the need to implement a Unicode capable SAP platform.

Solution

The move to a Unicode compliant version of SAP provided the Air Products IT organization with the opportunity to continue to expand their architectural direction of a Wintel and Microsoft-centric computing environment. The implementation of SAP had been accompanied by an aggressive application retirement program. Over six hundred applications had been eliminated. This process led to the decommissioning of the majority of proprietary Unix applications as well as the legacy mainframe computing environment. The last significant use of a non Wintel/MS computing environment was the SAP D/B running on that mainframe.

After extensive testing with the support of HP, Intel and Microsoft, Air Products chose to replace their existing mainframe-based SAP D/B solution with Itanium 2-based HP Integrity servers running Microsoft Windows and SQL Server. Air Products’ Integrity solution was complemented by Intel® Xeon® processor-based HP ProLiant servers for SAP application consolidation and 24x7 mission-critical support from HP.

Benefits

Reduced operating costs for the SAP environment.
Effective completion of the implementation of a WinTel & Microsoft-centric architecture.
Additional leverage of technical resources in IT’s area of technical strength.
Support of the business requirements of mission-critical availability and exceptional scalability to power what is one of the largest Windows-based SAP Single Global Instances in production in the world.