 |
"The new Configuration Management feature within CA's service optimization solution alone could save us ten person-days of work every quarter." |
Banking on the future
The Internet has helped to transform the financial services industry beyond recognition over the last few years. Not only has it led to new customer touch-points but it has also opened up the market to online newcomers offering cut-price interest rates and 24x7 service.
Despite this challenging landscape, Zions Management Services Company has been experiencing strong growth, with both the volume of customer loans and deposits rising in 2004/05.
The company, which is the largest full-service commercial bank in Utah, funded nearly $1.2 billion in new loans in 2005. The previous year, the company's subsidiary Zions Direct introduced a new online trading platform, which provides customers with access to 9,000 mutual funds and the ability to execute stock and bond trades.
Staying ahead of the competition
Thanks to such initiatives, the bank has been recognized as one of the top financial services providers in Utah and Idaho for the last four years running.
Maintaining this success in today's fast-moving financial services sector, however, is no easy task. To remain competitive, traditional banks have not only had to adopt a multichannel approach but also streamline their operations. The availability of these channels is essential, as downtime can impact not only a bank's reputation but also its revenues.
To support electronic banking and automated business processes, financial services companies must have a reliable and flexible IT infrastructure that can respond quickly to changing market conditions.
Zions Management Services Company's IT infrastructure includes more than 2,000 servers, approximately half of which are Windows-based and half of which are Solaris-based.
Cody Lowder, IS and IT Manager of Enterprise Management for Zions Management Services Company, comments, "One of the big problems with monitoring large environments like ours is trying to discover the initial problem that made all the dominoes fall."
This challenge was magnified when Zions Management Services Company expanded its number of branches through an acquisition. "We were sending scores of notifications to many IT technicians," comments Lowder.
Centralized service management
To help simplify its IT support burden, Zions Management Services Company decided to expand its existing service optimization capabilities. The bank had been a CA Network and Systems Management (NSM) user for five years, and has now upgraded to NSM r11.1.
CA's service availability management solution will serve as a Manager of Managers (MoM) platform, with the Management Command Center providing a centralized dashboard view that will increase end-to-end visibility and availability across the banking group's IT environment.
By using the solution's software agent intelligence, Zions Management Services Company is able to create a baseline for "normal" events and alerts on managed devices. This helps to decrease unnecessary event traffic and the volume of redundant information. CA's enhanced event correlation engine also helps IT managers quickly identify the root cause of network and systems performance issues.
Delivering excellent customer service
By enhancing the way its systems are monitored, the bank is able to reduce the number of false alerts and increase IT availability. This in turn helps the IT team at Zions Management Services Company concentrate on more pressing issues. "The new service availability management solution from CA will enable us to cut through the noise and drastically reduce the number of notifications we need to send out," adds Lowder.
As a result of this simplified and effective approach to IT management, Zions Management Services Company has been able to:
- Free up 40 person-days a year
- Provide customers with an improved level of service across multiple banking channels
- Increase its flexibility to cope with business growth
When an acquisition led to a 50 percent increase in the number of branches, Zions Management Services Company was able to handle the new infrastructure without taking on additional staff.
"The new Configuration Management feature within NSM could save us ten person-days of work every quarter," comments Lowder. "These types of efficiencies are essential if we are to effectively support the bank's continually growing technology portfolio within our strictly set resource constraints."
Content posted on: 16 July 2007
