CA Technologies will manage and monitor Tesco Group’s global IT infrastructure, including dotcom, bank and mobile businesses

CA Technologies will manage and monitor Tesco Group’s global IT infrastructure, including dotcom, bank and mobile businesses

A $45-million (£27.9m) landmark deal announced last week will see IT vendor CA Technologies managing and monitoring Tesco’s end-to-end IT supply chain of networks, suppliers, mainframe and credit card transactions.

The $45 million deal sees A number of the vendor’s products will be implemented to give Tesco visibility into the health and performance of its IT supply chain, including mainframe, desktop computers, servers, networks, credit card transactions, suppliers and supply orders across the entire Tesco Group, including Tesco Bank, Tesco.com and Tesco Mobile.

The investment is designed to help Tesco to take action before any IT problems evolve and affect services to customers.

Tracking complex, distributed IT infrastructure

With 472,000 staff working in over 5,000 stores across 14 countries, monitoring Tesco’s IT infrastructure is both time-consuming and complex. Having previously used a number of different systems from a range of vendors, Tesco selected the IT management systems to consolidate its IT infrastructure, while providing customers a consistently good service experience. The products deployed include CA Service Operations Insight (formerly CA Spectrum Service Assurance), CA SYSVIEW Performance Management and CA Process Automation.

Mike McNamara, Tesco chief information officer, said: “Our systems infrastructure needs to work for our IT team in order to do their job for our customers, our colleagues and our suppliers. We rely on CA Technologies software to tame a very big, distributed, heterogeneous infrastructure. We are very pleased to extend our long-standing relationship with CA Technologies into a third decade.”

Tesco also uses CA ecoSoftware (May/June 2010 Retail Technology magazine, page 18) to help increase the efficiency, speed and accuracy of its carbon accounting process, enabling the company to more effectively track progress in pursuit of its ambitious carbon reduction goals. Tesco monitors its global carbon footprint across a range of activities including IT, stores, refrigeration, distribution, waste and sourcing, using reports to help assess and lower this on an annual basis.