Varbergs Bostad — Successful pilot project of IBS Enterprise for Windows

Customer Story

For more than 15 years, Varbergs Bostad AB has run its financial operations using IBS Enterprise financial software. In that time, they have always been very happy with the system and wanted to continue working with it, but had reached a situation where it was the only application still running on an IBM Power System. They wanted a change—but of hardware, not software. Varbergs Bostad was an excellent candidate to be the first organization to implement the new IBS Enterprise for Windows solution.

About Varbergs Bostad AB

Varbergs Bostad is owned by the municipality of Varberg in Sweden. The organization offers attractive, secure and good value housing for the citizens of Varberg. The company also actively promotes positive development of the municipality of Varberg by means of satisfied tenants and attractive dwellings.

Varberg itself is a vibrant and expansive town with a growing population and an increasing demand for houses and flats. The production of new houses is essential for the continuous development of the municipality. The administration and management of Varbergs Bostad is carried out by dedicated staff who are in regular and easy contact with tenants. Their objective is to be able to answer questions on a broad range of topics as quickly and as accurately as possible and to take care of any damage or defects reported on the housing.

The solution

Supporting Varberg’s increasing number of properties and tenants drove the need to implement a more sophisticated financial accounting system. Rolf Nielsen, Administrative Manager for Varbergs Bostad, explains, “In the early 1990s we carried out an extensive search of the market to find a financial software solution that could meet our requirements. At that time, we selected the solution from IBS because it offered high levels of functionality and flexibility. Also, it ran on what was then the IBM AS400 (now the IBM Power System), which we already used for other systems, because it gave us the power and reliability we needed. This decision worked very well for us. We have always been very satisfied with IBS because it has fully supported our business throughout our association.”

More recently, Varbergs Bostad has changed its IT strategy. “While the IBM Power System is an excellent system and has served us very well, we have found that new generations of Windows-based servers provide more than enough power, functionality and reliability for our requirements. These new servers are also less expensive to manage and maintain. We had reached a situation where IBS was the only application left on the IBM Power System and it was not cost-effective to continue running this hardware platform for just one system,” says Nielsen.

It was at this time that IBS approached Varbergs Bostad with a potential solution that would prove very attractive. IBS had successfully established a new development environment based on the open development platform, Eclipse, and the IBS integration platform, IBS Integrator. Using this environment, IBS produced a Java version of IBS Enterprise for Windows, which could run on IBM’s new open x-Series 64-bit server with Windows operating system and Microsoft SQL Server.

Rolf Nielsen saw this as an excellent opportunity. “We really wanted to keep IBS as our main accounting system, because we believe it is the best solution for us. Therefore, when IBS invited us to become the pilot site for their new Windows version, we happily agreed.”

Implementation

In order to implement IBS Enterprise for Windows, Varbergs Bostad first had to upgrade to the latest version of IBS Enterprise. “The upgrade to version 6.0 of IBS Enterprise went very smoothly and we were impressed with the functionality and performance of the application,” Nielsen says, adding, “The transfer from the IBM Power System platform over to the Windows servers was carried out over a weekend and on Monday morning, nobody noticed the difference!”

IBS Enterprise 6.0 has delivered a host of additional benefits to Varbergs Bostad. “The new system is even easier to work with. It offers many more integration capabilities with other systems, including Excel and our other housing systems. The fact that IBS is now running on a Windows server simply means the system is easier and less expensive to run and maintain. We saw no difference at all between the two versions of IBS Enterprise 6.0: they both offered the same very high levels of functionality, ease of use and reliability,” he says.

The pilot phase of IBS Enterprise for Windows is continuing and IBS is implementing pilot sites across Europe in order to prove the capabilities of the system.

Rolf Nielsen concludes, “We were understandably a little nervous being the first company to implement a new system, but we needn’t have been. First the upgrade to IBS Enterprise 6.0 gave us an excellent solution that surpassed anything else we had used. Having benefited from implementing this system, the transfer to the Windows solution made no difference at all. We have the very same levels of functionality and performance that we enjoyed with the Power System version. I can fully recommend IBS Enterprise for Windows to any company wishing to run IBS Enterprise on a Windows server.”

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