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RACING CERTAINTY
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 5 No 01 - January/February 2005
The partnership between McLaren Racing and Computer Associates has entered
a dynamic new phase in terms of innovation and execution, putting even greater
thrust behind this powerful alliance.
McLaren Racing, the company behind the Team McLaren Mercedes Formula One team,
is taking full advantage of the breadth of vision of management software
specialist Computer Associates as part of their on-going relationship.
Behind the move is the key objective of finding new ways to improve the
framework for innovation and execution that has made Team McLaren Mercedes one
of the most successful contenders in Formula One racing.
CA will provide enterprise management, storage, security and knowledge
management software to enable McLaren Racing to achieve the one-tenths and
one-hundredths of a percentage performance differentiation that equals success
on the race track.
“We are effectively a small to medium business,” states Jonathan Neale, managing
director of McLaren Racing. “However, very few organisations in the world have
the competitive and very public performance benchmarks that we operate to. The
breadth of CA has given us peripheral vision to find new ways to achieve greater
performance. As a consequence, we are delighted to increase the range of its
solutions we use within McLaren Racing.”
CA has been a technology partner of McLaren since 1997 and its products have
been employed throughout McLaren Racing during the last eight years. In 2004, CA
and McLaren realised that the strategic value the relationship could bring to
McLaren Racing, in terms of finding new ways to innovate and execute, outweighed
the value of the products themselves. This realisation led to the deployment of
a broader, more integrated, solution set in the McLaren Technology Centre, the
new headquarters of the McLaren Group, to improve the operational efficiencies
of the team.
ESSENTIAL ROLE OF IT
“We are not able to start our cars without IT, but we are not an IT company,”
adds Neale. “We are a racing team, with over 400 people working towards
achieving success on track, and only nine of these are IT personnel to deal with
all our IT needs.
“By working closely with CA, we are able to identify and integrate new uses of
software to improve our handling of data, which has a direct impact on how well
we can design, build and race our cars. We are a zero fault tolerance
organisation – on a race weekend it is not conceivable that IT would let us
down. CA is helping us to build the systems to ensure this doesn’t happen. For
example, CA’s e-trust solutions help to prevent the half a million attempted
hacks into our system annually.”
As McLaren is quick to point out, data management and security are vital to its
well-being and survival, and it singles out the following imperatives in that
process:
DATA MANAGEMENT
Central to operational efficiency, data management is a point of competitive
differentiation. Making sense of the data is the difference between winning and
losing, which means ensuring:
• The right people get the right access at the right time
• A variety of inputs of data and levels of mission criticality of output, based
on area of business and point of time
• A constantly improved framework for innovation AND execution
DATA SECURITY
McLaren is a product excellence business and management of intellectual property
is vital. In a global business, its security challenges are:
• Photography at an event
• Industrial espionage
• Mobile engineers and lap tops
• Data flow out of the building on USB flash/compact flash media, removable
re-writable discs
• Waste management at a circuit
• Hackers
• Email, ISDN, ADSL Dataflows
• Virus attacks, which totalled 150 daily in 2004 alone.
“Formula One is the pinnacle of motor racing, but it is also the pinnacle of IT
usage by a company,” said Mark Bridger, country sales manager, CA. “The
complexity of the IT environment and pressures on it to perform require a very
clear overview of what IT can achieve and how it can contribute to the business.
“As one of the world’s biggest software companies with one of the broadest
software portfolios, that bigger picture is what we can bring. Helping McLaren
Racing to better protect, store and manage the mountains of data they collate
from a variety of inputs directly contributes to their ability to drive greater
performance out of the cars. That is a very tangible and visible form of return
on investment.”
NEW FAST-TRACK CA SOLUTIONS DRIVES McLAREN TEAM
The additional CA products installed at McLaren Racing include:
CA eTrust Security Command Center
eTrust Security Command Center helps businesses discover and prioritise relevant
security data to effectively manage their security risks in real time. By
correlating security risks to assets, they can take corrective action and
investigate security incidents through a centralised command and control centre.
It also helps the gathering of business intelligence to reduce risk, ensure
business continuity and comply with regulations.
CA eTrust Secure Content Manager
This is a product that protects against spam, unsolicited email, viruses, mobile
code threats and offensive material that deplete resources and impede
productivity. eTrust Secure Content Manager is a comprehensive solution that
addresses the content security issues that plague so many organisations. It
provides integrated, policy-based content security to defend against business
and network integrity threats.
CA BrightStor SRM with portal
BrightStor Portal provides a flexible, centralised approach to managing the
complex and diverse elements of enterprise-wide storage environments,
integrating and consolidating a wide range of data, applications and tasks.
State-of-the-art portal and visualisation technologies provide flexible, fully
customised access to information essential to each administrative and management
role in the storage enterprise, presenting information in a user-friendly,
business-oriented manner.
CA CleverPath portal
CleverPath Portal integrates information into a personalised, intelligent and
engaging environment that can be accessed from a web browser, mobile phone or
wireless PDA. Virtually any information, regardless of source, can be presented
and secured through CleverPath Portal and combined with critical information to
provide effective collaboration and decision-making. An extensive Portlet
Library also provides out-of-the-box integration, with a wide variety of
applications, systems and components.
WINNING FORMULA
McLaren Racing, the company behind the Team McLaren Mercedes team, was formed in
September 1980 as a result of a merger between Team McLaren and Project Four, a
British company owned by Ron Dennis, now chairman and CEO of the McLaren Group.
McLaren has won 11 Formula One Drivers’ Championships and eight Formula One
Constructors’ Championships, including the 1998 and 1999 Drivers’ World
Championship.
McLaren has been the most successful Formula One team in the recent history of
the sport. In the past 20 years, McLaren has won nine Formula One Drivers’ World
Championships and seven Formula One Constructors’ Championships, securing 108
victories, which is more than any of its competitors.
PERFORMANCE STATS
Top Speed:
350 Kph
Acceleration:
0 -100 Kph 2.3s
0 - 200 Kph 5s
Braking:
330 -100 Kph 3.2s
‘g’ force 4.1g
distance 169m
Corner forces:
entry 297 Kph
-2g to +3.7g in 0.75s
Gear Changes:
3,300 per race
Duration under 50 ms from start of sequence
Full Throttle:
70% of the time
78% of the distance
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