Alchemist Saves Money and Improves Productivity At Idaho Power; Cybermation Streamlines Processes and Provides Risk-free Conversion.

Business Editors

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2001

Cybermation Inc., a leading developer of integrated enterprise systems management software, announced the successful conversion of Idaho Power to its Alchemist software change management (SCM) solution from a competitive SCM product. This has saved the company considerable costs, and has significantly improved productivity.

Faced with upgrade fees for its existing software change management solution, Idaho Power evaluated Alchemist, and made the switch rapidly "based on the comfort level that we'd already established with Cybermation and the enthusiasm of other Alchemist users we met with," explained Greg Farrington, Systems Administrator at Idaho Power. Idaho Power was already an enthusiastic user of Cybermation's enterprise scheduling solution, ESP Workload Manager.

Two members of Cybermation Professional Services performed the Alchemist installation over a period of just three days, during which time implementation training was also provided to all Idaho Power product administrators. Cybermation also developed an interface to Idaho Power's new customer information system that was replacing their legacy customer accounting system. Adding to the complexity of the project was the fact that Idaho Power needed to maintain nine different environments throughout the conversion process and maintain both the old and new SCM systems until Alchemist was fully installed and training was completed.

Immediate payback

Idaho Power quickly learned to appreciate and take advantage of their new solution's many features. Farrington said, "Alchemist has proven to be half as complicated as our previous solution and one-tenth as complicated as those we evaluated from other companies."

Idaho Power also took the opportunity to clean up legacy application components as part of the conversion process and establish more stringent change management practices, as well. For example, they decreased their JCL procedures library from 1300 members to just 300, saving time and valuable storage space.

Enthusiastic Users

"We are very satisfied with Alchemist and glad we switched," said Farrington. "Not only is it less expensive than other solutions, it's better than everything else, prompting us to put better procedures in place as well as streamline our processes. Support has been very good, too. Cybermation allows our technicians to talk directly to their Alchemist developers, who all appear to be hard workers and night owls!"

Future development

Idaho Power currently runs Alchemist on OS/390 and the mainframe. They have 130 distributed servers running on an NT platform, and future plans include implementing Alchemist in this environment. They are also actively investigating managing their Web environment with Alchemist. For the present, however, Idaho Power is satisfied with using Alchemist within their established change management processes and with exploiting its many rich, new features - providing the company with the opportunity to remain competitive and provide value for customers and shareholders alike.

About Idaho Power

Established in 1916, Idaho Power Company is a regulated electric utility company serving more than 400,000 residential, business, agricultural and industrial customers in a 20,000-square-mile service area encompassing southern Idaho, eastern Oregon and northern Nevada. Its mission is to provide reliable electricity and customer service essential to just about everything people do today and to be the provider of choice for essential services that bring value, comfort and convenience to people's lives. The company owns and operates 17 hydroelectric plants on the Snake River and its tributaries and shares ownership in three coal-fired generating stations. In September, 1998, Idaho Power was named the "most efficient" utility in the nation by Public Utilities Fortnightly magazine. The company is a subsidiary of Boise-based IDACORP Inc.

About Cybermation

Cybermation Inc. is recognized by its many Global 2000 customers as a leading developer of best-of-breed automation solutions for job scheduling, workload management and software change management for heterogeneous computing environments, and for its systems management expertise. The company's products include ESP Workload Manager(R) for enterprise-wide job scheduling and workload management for OS/390(R), UNIX(R), Windows NT(R) and OS/400(R) operating systems as well as for SAP R/3, Oracle and PeopleSoft ERP environments; ESP Espresso(R) for distributed job scheduling in any environment; ESP Workstation graphical user interface for enterprise scheduling from a single point of control; ESP Encore(R) for automated rerun, restart and recovery; ESP Console Manager(R) for console automation; and ESP Alchemist, the software change management system for both software development and data-center production environments. Cybermation's customers include Hudson's Bay Company, Statistics Canada, and CN Rail in Canada, Allstate Insurance, JC Penney, Nike, Deere & Co. and Verizon in the United States, and One 2 One, Sony Europe, VHV and Janssen Pharmaceutica in Europe. The company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and has offices throughout the United States, Europe, England and Australia.