Mr. Ron Ekins

"The new product lifecycle management tool ? will allow us to communicate freely not just in the company but via secure links to the Ministry of Defence's (MoD's) local area network," commented Ron Ekins, business architect consultant at Thales UK.

Secure communication with the MoD is vital to Thales, considering the defence systems contractor is currently developing several projects with the ministry such as the Watchkeeper spy plane and its new state-of-the-art aircraft carriers.

IT consolidation will also reduce costs as the IT support teams are merged, Mr Ekins explained.

"Along with IT support there are also lots of different hardware and software maintenance contracts.With that being trimmed into one platform the savings are astronomical," he said.

Running the databases over multiple servers, Thales employees will also remain able to access physical disks even in the event of a node going down, for instance.

In this event, "we can guarantee availability of information to the business," Mr Ekins said, adding: "Along with our Linux operating system, it means we can reduce the number of servers we need to support Thales UK."

Without a coherent IT system to bind different divisions of the company, the business has almost been working as though it were 30 separate companies, says Ron Ekins, a Thales UK business architect consultant.

,In that environment it has been very difficult to move the projects we are working on between different parts of the company in a coherent way,, he said.
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With more than 30 systems the company needed a lot of IT support teams, says Ekins.

,Along with IT support there were also lots of different hardware and software maintenance contracts.With that being trimmed into one platform the savings are astronomical,, he said.

As part of the consolidation process, Thales has introduced a grid-based database system to ensure its 10,000 staff have reliable access to all its information.

The Oracle grid allows Thales to have databases that are running over multiple servers, accessing the same physical disks, says Ekins.

,If a node goes down, we can guarantee availability of information to the business,, he said.