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Mercedes-Benz Switzerland Reaps Benefits of Enterprise Management

27 April 1999

Mercedes-Benz Switzerland Reaps Benefits of Enterprise Management in Less than Three Months With CA's Unicenter TNG

     Daimler-Chrysler Group Subsidiary Unifies 80-Dealership Network with
   Integrated Network Monitoring, Asset Management and Help Desk Operations

    KLOTEN, Switzerland, April 27 -- Mercedes-Benz (Switzerland)
AG, one of Europe's largest automobile dealerships, has chosen CA's Unicenter
TNG to manage a vast, nationwide heterogeneous network of information systems.
Mercedes-Benz's Unicenter TNG deployment -- which was completed in less than
three months -- is enabling the company to maintain, monitor and upgrade its
diverse information systems and to respond more quickly to potential system
problems via streamlined help desk operations.
    Mercedes-Benz (Switzerland) AG, the Swiss subsidiary of the
DaimlerChrysler Group, is responsible for sales, distribution and service for
Mercedes-Benz vehicles in Switzerland.  The company's 80 agencies in
Switzerland are connected through Frame Relay and ISDN networks.
    Mercedes-Benz relies on a heterogeneous IT infrastructure anchored by an
IBM VM/VSE mainframe computer running the CA-IDMS database as well as
Sapiens-based and homegrown COBOL applications.  The infrastructure includes
numerous AS/400 and Windows NT servers hosting business applications for spare
parts administration, sales and distribution, along with PC clients running
Windows NT.
    With more than half of its dealerships adopting a new generation of
distributed applications -- and with its growing reliance on a worldwide
warranty administration system -- Mercedes-Benz urgently needed an enterprise
management solution that would enable it to support a centralized help desk to
provide quick resolution of systems problems.  Mercedes-Benz selected
Unicenter TNG after thoroughly evaluating IBM/Tivoli TME, Hewlett-Packard's
OpenView, and products from COS and Spider Network.
    "Of these products, only Unicenter TNG offered clear advantages," said
Achim Kaier, systems engineering manager at Mercedes-Benz (Switzerland) AG.
"Unicenter TNG could be implemented much faster and is less labor-intensive.
Rapid installation is extremely important to us."
    Mercedes' IT professionals were trained on Unicenter TNG in just one week,
resulting in full deployment in less than three months.  Along with Unicenter
TNG Advanced Help Desk, Mercedes-Benz implemented the asset management module
for tracking hardware and software resources.
    "Unicenter TNG allows us to monitor and control our IT resources in an
ideal manner," said Lothar Zank, chief information officer at Mercedes-Benz
(Switzerland) AG.  "With Unicenter TNG's Advanced Help Desk alone, we've been
able to reduce operations staff time by up to a third."
    In addition to addressing the company's immediate need for help desk and
asset management, Mercedes-Benz officials were impressed with Unicenter TNG's
broad management capabilities.  "We plan to add a number of additional
management functions over the next few months such as scheduling, database
recovery and automatic server start/stop, as well as defining events and
automating the operations that go with them," said Kaier.  "We view Unicenter
TNG as a very comprehensive, automated solution that can easily handle our
current and future requirements."
    "Mercedes-Benz (Switzerland) AG provides a dramatic example of how quickly
an organization can begin to receive the concrete business benefits that
enterprise management can deliver," said Bruno Staub, CA senior vice president
for Austria, Switzerland and Central and Eastern Europe.  "Unicenter TNG is
particularly well-suited to such staged deployments, where a customer like
Mercedes can attack their most pressing problems right away and then continue
to add functionality as required over time."

    About Swiss Mercedes-Benz
    Mercedes-Benz (Switzerland) AG is a subsidiary of Daimler-Benz AG,
Stuttgart.  The company markets the parent company's passenger cars and
commercial vehicles in Switzerland and the principality of Liechtenstein
through a sales and distribution network that comprises 170 outlets.  The
Schlieren head office and the central parts warehouse in Wetzikon employ
250 people.  For more information, contact http://www.mercedes-benz.ch.

    About Computer Associates
    Computer Associates International, Inc. , the world leader in
mission-critical business computing, provides software, support and
integration services in more than 100 countries around the world.  CA has more
than 13,000 employees and had revenue of $5.1 billion in calendar year 1998.

    All referenced product names are trademarks of their respective companies.