Company
News
EMC Equals E-Commerce for OfficeMax
EMC Helps OfficeMax Reduce Downtime Risks and Enables Safe E-Commerce
Deployment
HOPKINTON, Mass. - December 10, 1998 — EMC Corporation announced
today that OfficeMax, Inc., the nation's largest operator of office products superstores,
has selected EMC Enterprise
Storage systems and advanced software to enhance information availability and
streamline management of its rapidly growing catalog and electronic commerce business.
"With EMC Enterprise Storage, OfficeMax provides more continuous access to our
mission-critical systems, which in turn improves customer satisfaction," said Michael
Feuer, OfficeMax's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "Our e-commerce site is always online, our
call centers are open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and we operate 17 delivery
centers around the country that guarantee next-day delivery. Any short period of system
downtime may result in lost customers, revenue and profitability."
To support the growing need for around-the-clock information availability, OfficeMax
has acquired Fibre Channel-connected EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and several
EMC software solutions -- including EMC TimeFinder, EMC PowerPath and Symmetrix Manager.
OfficeMax, based in Cleveland, Ohio, will use EMC TimeFinder
to transparently create a copy of production data, freeze it at a point in time, and allow
parallel backup access to this data while productive work continues. TimeFinder will
protect mission-critical applications, including a new SAP enterprise-wide business system
running on Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 servers.
"Performing backups with TimeFinder while the systems are running will eliminate a
significant portion of our planned outages," explained Feuer. "TimeFinder will
let us run backups on a daily basis -- which is much more frequently than traditional
backup methods allow. This increases systems uptime while gaining higher-quality backup
copies, which protect us more fully against potential data loss.
"A consistent disk storage and backup strategy with EMC Enterprise Storage allows
OfficeMax to better manage and safeguard data -- the value of which is rapidly increasing
as more of our business goes online."
Skyrocketing Growth of Electronic Commerce Drives Storage Expansion
"In the last year, our Web business has grown dramatically," observed Feuer.
"With this tremendous growth comes an explosion of data that needs to be stored and
managed -- which is where EMC steps in. Consolidating our storage with EMC enables us to
support the increasing number of platforms in our environment. A centralized approach
lowers our overall management costs and improves utilization of our information
assets."
The flexibility of EMC Enterprise Storage also is enabling OfficeMax to more easily
manage the transition to a new infrastructure based on SAP, Oracle, as well as Sun,
Hewlett Packard and NT servers.
Feuer noted, "We dramatically minimize the risk of change since incompatibility
issues are virtually eliminated when we add new platforms."
Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels, said, "EMC
Enterprise Storage is allowing strategically focused companies like OfficeMax to meet
change and growth with confidence. With the flexibility of EMC Enterprise Storage,
companies can avoid the risks these changes present and instead turn them into
opportunities to improve customer service and generate even more growth."
About EMC and OfficeMax
EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's
technology and market leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent enterprise
storage systems, software and services. The company's products store, retrieve, manage,
protect and share information from all major computing environments, including UNIX,
Windows NT and mainframe platforms. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New
York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. For
further information about EMC and its storage solutions, EMC's corporate web site can be
accessed at http://www.EMC.com.
Today, OfficeMax is the country's largest office products superstore chain as
measured by number of stores and breadth of geographic coverage. The Company operates over
780 full-size superstores featuring over 8,000 office products, computers, business
machines, and related items in more than 330 markets in 48 states and Puerto Rico. The
Company also operates CopyMax and FurnitureMax, store-within-a-store modules devoted
exclusively to print-for-pay services and office furniture, respectively. In addition,
OfficeMax has 17 delivery centers throughout the United States to serve its catalog and
direct marketing businesses. Through joint venture partnerships, OfficeMax operates
superstores in Mexico and Japan, and recently announced its plans to enter the Brazil
market through a third joint venture.
With the launch of OfficeMax Online® in 1995, OfficeMax became the first office
products superstore retailer to sell products over the Internet. In addition to its vast
product assortment, OfficeMax.com offers easy-to-use search and browse features, order
tracking and usage reports, and customized express order templates. These features enable
OfficeMax.com customers and businesses to efficiently buy a wide assortment of merchandise
at http://www.officemax.com.
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