Whirlpool Corporation Teams with IBM Services to Manage Global Operations on the Cloud

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Oct 25, 2018, 14:00 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Whirlpool Corporation today announced that Whirlpool will use IBM Cloud to manage and provide 24/7 access to the company's critical enterprise applications including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and business warehouse to help provide worldwide operations efficiency.

As Whirlpool Corporation purposefully innovates its smart appliances to fulfill real human needs, it must increasingly rely on growing amounts of data to achieve what consumers expect from the world's leading manufacturer of major home appliances.

In working with IBM on a cloud-based approach, the Benton Harbor, Mich., based Whirlpool Corporation will leverage the flexibility and scalability of the IBM Cloud to run Whirlpool's SAP HANA environments, including around the clock insights into its 70 manufacturing global sites, its distribution and call centers, and other systems to provide worldwide access and increased efficiencies.

"Whirlpool Corporation is a manufacturing leader, and we have moved our work to the cloud aggressively," said Mike Berendsen, vice president of IT for Whirlpool Corporation. "This collaboration with IBM will continue to allow us to leverage the capabilities of SAP on HANA as we continue to be a tech-forward company in the products we design and our global work environments."

To help clients address this, IBM introduced a new SAP-certified IBM Services for Managed Applications for SAP HANA workloads. Through this integrated approach of hardware, software, and services, IBM is the first to offer this level of cloud support for massive workloads of up to 24 TB by using IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage. This means that even the largest customers have the capacity they need to reap the benefits of HANA's in-memory analytics on the cloud.

The SAP HANA on Power solution hosted in the IBM Cloud is designed to be flexible and scalable to manage and operate Whirlpool Corporation's significant operational requirements. This is key for an organization like Whirlpool Corporation because their business requirements drive very large HANA platforms exceeding generally available cloud HANA capacities.

"The advent of emerging technologies has provided companies like Whirlpool Corporation with a whole new platform to innovate on," said Mark Slaga, global technology services general manager for IBM Services for Managed Applications. "Prior solutions often lacked the ability to scale to meet the needs of clients like Whirlpool and required substantial customization, which could drive up costs. With this solution, we're providing Whirlpool Corporation the means to scale its HANA environment to keep up on strategy."

By providing Whirlpool with access to massive SAP workloads on IBM Cloud, the company now has options to expand its SAP HANA portfolio and can focus on what's most important to its business.

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ABOUT WHIRLPOOL CORPORATION
Whirlpool Corporation (NYSE: WHR) is the world's leading major home appliance company, with approximately $21 billion in annual sales, 92,000 employees and 70 manufacturing and technology research centers in 2017. The company markets Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Maytag, Consul, Brastemp, Amana, Bauknecht, JennAir, Indesit and other major brand names in nearly every country throughout the world. Additional information about the company can be found at WhirlpoolCorp.com, or find us on Twitter at @WhirlpoolCorp