The Paradies Shops operates over 500 stores in over 60 airports and hotels across the U.S. and Canada, serving more then a half billion customers each year. These stores include everything from national branded merchandise to original, one-of-a-kind brands unique to individual airports. The Paradies Shops is the most recognized and acclaimed concessionaire and has been named the nation’s "Best Airport Retailer" for eleven consecutive years.

The Paradies Shops had experienced tremendous growth both in number of stores and sales dollars. In the past 5 years, they doubled their business from $200M to $400M and needed to support future growth.

With their current IT system, an IBM RS6000, response time had slowed to a crawl and had no room for growth. The Paradies Shops knew it could not take them to the next level of productivity that was necessary to grow their business.

The Paradies Shops had always been an IBM shop and wanted to remain so. Genisys Group, Inc. had a long and successful relationship with their enterprise for all of their IBM acquisitions and was asked to build a scalable, cost-effective IT infrastructure to support the company’s growth.

Genisys presented The Paradies Shops with detailed information about the current pSeries line based on Power 5. Numerous configurations were put together for review by both Paradies and their software vendor, GERS. After a strategic assessment of their needs, it became clear that the p5 570 was the logical choice. The Paradies Shops already had experience with the power and reliability of the IBM AIX operating system and were impressed with the price/performance potential.

Proposals were evaluated on three major points:

1. Scalability for future growth
2. Ease of migration of current applications
3. Price/Performance

The IBM p5 570 system’s outstanding processing capacity and intuitive management tools meant Paradies could gain the power and capacity it needed to run its core applications. 

With three IT staff members dedicated to the data center environment, the p5 570 enabled The Paradies Shops to do more with less and leverage the capabilities of the IT organization. At the same time, the company has the freedom and scalability to grow the business by adding processors and DASD to the same server; thereby keeping hardware costs down and contributing to a low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

Genisys’ consultants who specialize in IBM p5 Systems provided the services required for a smooth and painless implementation and migration from the current RS6000 system.

The Paradies Shops has benefited greatly from this solution:

• Users love the response time when using the host application for the merchandising system. The system provides increased processing power and more efficient disk controllers and memory, which result in more bang for the buck.
  
  
• Paradies was able to achieve a Hot Backup environment with the new machine resulting in 24 hour-a-day uptime. The configuration of the p570 provides the confidence that customers and employees will have access to the information they need when they need it.
  
  
• Savings were realized by eliminating the maintenance costs on the old IBM RS6000. The new p570 maintenance costs are half that of the older technology with more than double the processing power and expandability.