ARMONK, NY -- IBM today announced that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has selected IBM Enterprise Storage Servers and IBM eServer z900 mainframes as the backbone of Wal-Mart's worldwide data center infrastructure that serves more than 4,000 Wal-Mart stores, Supercenters and SAM's Club facilities and millions of customers worldwide. Wal-Mart is using the new Enterprise Storage Servers (code named "Shark") and the eServer z900 to create an e-business infrastructure that will more efficiently and quickly handle the data processing, reconciliation, debit and credit transactions, as well as the product replenishment for all of its retail outlets. "This new IBM technology allows us to have a faster processing time, greater availability of our systems and better systems operation without interruption," said Dan Phillips, vice president, Technology Support and Operations, Wal-Mart. "The IBM Shark and eServer z900 have given us a significant improvement in our processing time, in some cases allowing us to cut our processing time for some jobs by more than half." This ability to save processing time allows Wal-Mart a faster look at trends in inventory and sales, allowing the retailer an even sharper focus on customer service, its low-price philosophy and international expansion and growth. "Wal-Mart's unwavering focus on customer service and business efficiency is near legendary in retailing, and they are widely known as visionary leaders in leveraging information technology to achieve those goals. Wal-Mart chose IBM's Shark and eServer z900 servers after rigorous benchmarking that demonstrated their reliability, power and capability," said David Carlucci, general manager, IBM Americas. "As companies transform themselves from businesses to e-businesses, their number one priority is building an IT infrastructure that is powerful enough to do the job now, and flexible enough to grow. Wal-Mart is doing that here." For additional information visit www.ibm.com