IBM Systems Help Save County More Than $3 Million and Improve Access for More Than 700,000 Residents

IBM Systems Help Save County More Than $3 Million and Improve Access for More Than 700,000 Residents

IBM today announced that Pierce County, one of the largest counties in Washington, has implemented an IBM systems infrastructure to support a new enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS) solution for the community’s 700,000 residents and 35 agencies. The new technology consolidated infrastructure — which will help increase the County’s system capacity and lower the technology costs — is designed to allow the County to provide its residents key information such as neighborhood crime statistics, resident polling locations, property tax research, and surveying reports, on demand.

Pierce County’s GIS department is responsible for designing and maintaining geographic data information for the entire county. Before undergoing the consolidation project, Pierce County was running its GIS software on HP and Sun Microsystems servers, connected to EMC storage. By teaming with IBM and Business Partner ESRI, Pierce County was able to create an information on demand infrastructure running ESRI mission critical applications that is anticipated to help save the County up to $3 million on technology and maintenance costs. Importantly, this systems consolidation includes a redundant database and system design to help support law enforcement and emergency management business continuity.

“As with most government agencies, we were on a tight budget but we faced a major dilemma as demand for our services was growing, yet the infrastructure we had in place was not — and we could not add servers, storage and people to solve the problem,” said Linda Gerull, Pierce County’s GIS Manager. “IBM helped us develop a consolidated systems architecture for our enterprise GIS that will achieve tremendous equipment and labor cost savings, increased capacity for many years and improved reliability.”

Read the complete Press Release