SERVICES FOR CUSTOMER SOLUTION

Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. Published: July, 2002 Air Products replaces global VAX VMS print servers with the Interix and LBM Solution Overview UniQue Print software solution Customer Profile Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (NYSE:APD) is the world’s only combined gases and chemicals company. With operations in 30 countries worldwide, and over 18,000 employees, Air Products has annual revenues of $5.7B. When Air Products needed to replace their aging VAX VMS print servers, www.airproducts.com they needed a product that could handle 800 users, 650 printers and Business Situation Outdated VAX VMS print 50,000 pages a day on a single Pentium II . LBM Systems’ UniQue servers needed to be replaced. Print, ported on Interix technology that is now part of Services for UNIX Maintenance costs had become prohibitive. Host 3.0, provided the perfect solution. based, forms printing to over 1200 print queues in 250 locations worldwide.

Solution Situation Replaced 2 VAX VMS servers Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (NYSE:APD) is the world’s only combined gases and chemicals with 2 Windows NT4 servers, running Microsoft Interix and company. Founded more than 60 years ago and headquartered in eastern Pennsylvania’s Lehigh LBM Systems’ UniQue Print software. Valley, the company has annual revenues of $5.7 billion and operations in 30 countries. Air Products is a market leader in the global electronics and chemical processing industries, and Benefits a long-standing innovator in many industrial markets, including coatings, adhesives and ? Easier Support ? Reduced Costs polyurethanes. ? High efficiency ? Easy Migration The challenge facing Air Products was how to move their worldwide, host based, printing Software and Services operation from their current VAX VMS platform to a modern, fully supported platform while (Include trademarks and list retaining the ability to manage all printing from a single, central, location. Their VAX VMS software in following order as appropriate) systems were outdated and becoming increasingly expensive to support and maintain. With Microsoft® Windows NT4® offices in over 250 locations and 18,000 employees worldwide, and over 8,000 users printing LBM Systems UniQue Print Microsoft Interix 50,000 pages a day, managing the host based printing needed to be as simple and cost effective as possible. The requirements, according to Eugene Prokop, of Air Products Network Printing Partners LBM Systems, LLC Team, “It needed to run on Windows, handle forms control, be stable and allow the same number 145 Cherry Street of queues worldwide.” New Canaan, CT 06840 www.lbmsys.com Solution Air Products chose LBM Systems’ UniQue Print software, running on Microsoft’s Interix technology. Interix is now part of Microsoft Services for UNIX version 3.0, which was released in May 2002. LBM’s UniQue Print is supported on a variety of UNIX platforms, but for Air Products, the ability to use UniQue Print on was a critical part of the requirements. As Eugene Prokop pointed out “Though we had some existing UNIX servers, and were comfortable with a UNIX environment, the company mandate was to not install additional UNIX servers, but to migrate existing and new applications to Microsoft Windows.”

Air Products chose two Pentium II servers – one a 233MHz server with 256Mb of RAM, and the other a 550 MHz server, also with 256 Mb of RAM, both running Microsoft Windows NT4, SP6a. The LBM Systems UniQue installation automatically installed the Microsoft Interix technology as part of the overall installation. The initial deployment of 600 print queues on the 233 MHz server took 3 months with most of that time being taken up with testing and configuration of print queues. With the quality control testing and print queue configuration already accomplished, deployment of the second server took less than one month.

Benefits For Air Products, the move to UniQue and Interix provided a number of benefits, including lowering their total cost of ownership. By eliminating their dependency on an antiquated pair of VAX VMS servers that were becoming increasingly expensive to maintain; they improved the “We’re extremely satisfied. stability and recovery time from the previous system; and they significantly reduced their support We like the combination of problems with the graphical administrative interface of UniQue. UniQue and Interix.” Reduced Training Costs A big plus of the move to UniQue and Interix was the reduction in training costs from: Eugene Prokop Network Printing Team 1.) Better ease of use with UniQue’s graphical administrative interface Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

2.) The increased productivity provided by Interix’s familiar UNIX environment

The graphical interface of UniQue made it possible for the help desk to get up to speed quickly. This allowed the vast majority of user problems to be resolved by the help desk, limiting the number of calls to the Network Printing Team.

The familiar UNIX interface of Interix won immediate acceptance of the new system. Also, as Prokop pointed out, “The VAX/VMS environment was a dead end and required a unique and disappearing set of skills

Reduced Maintenance Costs, Improved Stability and Recovery By retiring the aging VAX machines, Air Products was able to reduce their cost for hardware and software maintenance by over 70% when compared to the legacy systems, even after the acquisition cost of new hardware and software was included in the equation.

Even more important, on a daily basis, was the stability and recovery speed provided by the Windows platform. Rebooting the VAX servers took a long time – 30 to 45 minutes – highly important in an operation that needs to support users at 250 locations worldwide. As Prokop commented, “Now, we hardly ever need to reboot, but in cases where we still do, we just do it -- the process is quick enough that the users hardly notice. “

Excellent Efficiency As Eugene Prokop said of the new system “We were, frankly, quite surprised at how well this solution handled our printing load. With over 50, 000 pages being printed every day and over 650 print queues on a single server, we expected the server to be struggling, but it wasn’t so. We looked at the CPU usage, and were very satisfied by its performance.”

“Overall, are very happy with our choice, “ said Prokop. “We like the ability to run UniQue on a UNIX environment from Microsoft. We have the perfect combination – a graphical administration tool that offloads most of the support calls to our help desk, and the familiar UNIX command line environment that lets us remotely administer, even over a dialup line, saving us a lot of headache and lost sleep.”

Microsoft Services for UNIX version 3.0 provides a full range of supported and fully integrated cross-platform network services geared towards enterprise customers needing to integrate Windows into their existing UNIX-based environment. It allows enterprise customers seamless access to information stored in multiple platforms, consolidates network management across platforms, and reuses UNIX applications and scripts on Windows. For more information about Microsoft Services for UNIX version 3.0, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/default.asp

LBM Systems UniQue Print combines comprehensive mainframe features with ease-of-use design that allows even the most complicated printing environments to be controlled in a user-friendly fashion from Windows print servers running Services for UNIX 3.0. UniQue Print saves you and your users valuable time and resources by providing complete control over your printing output. Users will no longer burden system administrators and IT personnel with "lost print job" problems, freeing IT personnel to attend to more critical issues. Using our Java GUI, print jobs can even be securely monitored and modified from any PC in any location without logging on to the server- even through the Internet! For more information visit http://www.lbmsys.com.

For More Information For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/ For more information about LBM Systems products and services, call (800) 898-6434 or visit the Web site at: http://www.lbmsys.com © 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Windows, Interix and Services for UNIX are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.