Nielsen Lowers IT Infrastructure TCO with TIBCO Silver Fabric

Nielsen Lowers IT Infrastructure TCO with
TIBCO Silver Fabric
Lower TCO, reduced costs, simplified operations,
faster development cycles
“TIBCO Silver Fabric is
bringing great value by
letting us get updates done
faster, push changes out to
our clients faster, and have
a more agile environment
that application teams can
develop, prototype, and
test in.”
— Jeff Baker, project manager,
Service Delivery Team for TIBCO
products, Nielsen
DETAIL
400
SERVERS
TIBCO environment at Nielsen
Nielsen delivers critical media and marketing information, analytics, and industry
expertise about what consumers buy, watch, and listen to (consumer interaction
with television, radio, online, and mobile viewing and listening platforms) on a
global and local basis. Nielsen’s Buy and Watch business segments are built on
an extensive foundation of proprietary data assets designed to yield essential
insights and solutions that help its clients maintain and strengthen their market
positions and identify opportunities for profitable growth.
Jeff Baker, project manager for Nielsen’s service delivery team for TIBCO
products, explains. “The Nielsen applications infrastructure is quite complex. We
have two large data centers in North America and probably 8,000 or 9,000
servers. We have just about any kind of software configuration you can think
of. Our platform is a group of shared servers that applications run on with the
purpose of efficiently using resources. We have some challenges when it comes
to managing that environment due to the different SLAs of the apps, but we do
try to make things as common and shared as possible.”
CHALLENGE
Because it relies on so many applications, agreeing on outages is difficult. To
get agreement to bring down and make a server supporting TIBCO Enterprise
Message Service™ highly available took 11 months. “That’s when we started
looking at TIBCO Silver® Fabric. We found that it could greatly benefit our shared
environment,” says Baker.
SUCCESS STORY | 2
NIELSEN
SOLUTION
Nielsen is a leading global
information and measurement
company that provides
clients with a comprehensive
understanding of consumers and
consumer behavior.
Most industry analysts agree that every IT strategy needs cloud as an option for
application delivery. Cloud brings down costs. Plus, TIBCO Silver Fabric PaaS
will support public, private, physical, or virtual deployment models. Any kind of
infrastructure can be marshaled by the system, as well, so it lets you maintain
choice and flexibility of your infrastructure. Because it’s hosted on-premise, it
supplies the security and control of the datacenter.
BENEFITS
FAST FACTS
Presence: 106 countries
Revenue (2014): US$6.3B
Clients: 20,000+
Employees: 42,000
NYSE: NLSN
“TIBCO Silver Fabric has
been enabled for a lot of
different technologies.
We initially adopted the
BusinessWorks enabler,
that’s the biggest footprint
of our TIBCO environment.
But we’re also adopting
enablers for ActiveMatrix,
BusinessEvents, TIBCO
Enterprise Message Service,
et cetera. We’ll probably
do that over the next six to
eight months and kind of
grow into it.”
— Jeff Baker, project manager,
Service Delivery Team
for TIBCO products, Nielsen
SIMPLIFIED OPERATIONS
By decoupling middleware and applications from operating system and hardware
resources, TIBCO Silver Fabric lets Nielsen define disaster recovery solutions with
simple configurations. Applications don’t need any changes; the team just uses
TIBCO Silver Fabric to move and restart them. Nielsen’s large TIBCO footprint is
also more dynamic and flexible. The company can mix technologies on shared
servers, and move applications around for easier maintenance.
Another benefit is high availability. TIBCO Silver Fabric demand-driven
optimization continuously drives infrastructure resources to the most important
apps. “We collect metrics and put rules in place to scale so that application
performance can remain acceptable to our clients, regardless of what’s going on
in the environment,” says Baker.
SHORTENED DEVELOPMENT TIMELINES
Baker says that TIBCO Silver Fabric is lowering the total cost of ownership for
applications developed internally because buying dedicated hardware to support
them is not necessary. The applications can just join the environment and run on
existing infrastructure. With less time spent procuring infrastructure, development
is faster. “We found that TIBCO Silver Fabric was very minimal change. The
developer teams don’t really see any difference. TIBCO Silver Fabric hides all the
complexity, so everything appears as if it’s a normal TIBCO setup,” Baker says.
MAXIMUM HARDWARE UTILIZATION
“TIBCO Silver Fabric is allowing us to take our 400 TIBCO servers, put them into a
more shared environment, and add additional technologies, so we can build out a
better-used environment, which lowers total cost of ownership,” says Baker.
FUTURE
Using non-TIBCO enablers, TIBCO Silver Fabric supplies a shared environment for
JBoss and Web Logic Server instances, as well. “We’re going to pull JBoss and Web
Logic servers into the same TIBCO Silver Fabric setup for, again, lowering total cost
of ownership for applications,” says Baker.
Global Headquarters
3307 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
+1 650-846-1000 TEL
+1 800-420-8450
+1 650-846-1005 FAX
www.tibco.com
TIBCO Software Inc. is a global leader in infrastructure and business intelligence software. Whether it’s
optimizing inventory, cross-selling products, or averting crisis before it happens, TIBCO uniquely delivers the
Two-Second Advantage®— the ability to capture the right information at the right time and act on it preemptively
for a competitive advantage. With a broad mix of innovative products and services, customers around the world
trust TIBCO as their strategic technology partner. Learn more about TIBCO at www.tibco.com.
©2014–2015, TIBCO Software Inc. All rights reserved. TIBCO, the TIBCO logo, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, and TIBCO Silver are trademarks or registered
trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks in this document are the
property of their respective owners and mentioned for identification purposes only.
09/08/15