Monitoring Proves To Be An "Asset" To Financial Institution During Migration To WebSphere

Description

  • Financial Institution Monitoring Solution

Business Needs

  • Keep infrastructure stable
  • Identify bottlenecks, trends and usage
  • Decrease downtime

Software

  • IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for WebSphere Application Server (ITCAM for WAS)

CLIENT BACKGROUND

A Sunbelt-based financial institution which operates 420 full-service banking centers and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a global financial services company with more than $698 billion in total assets, 44 million clients, 8,800 branches and approximately 110,000 employees in more than 30 countries. When combined with its three other U.S. banking companies, the financial institution ranks as the largest regional bank in the Sunbelt region and among the top 25 banks in the U.S. by total deposits. 

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Now more than ever, financial institutions have to be fiercely competitive to stay in the game while adhering to strict regulations and scrutiny. Keeping their infrastructure stable and with zero downtime can make or break their success. 

One major contribution to customer satisfaction is having reliable and responsive banking experiences. To ensure that their customers were receiving the very best in care, this financial institution initiated a major initiative to improve the reliability of their overall infrastructure.  Having over 50 disparate but mission-critical applications – many of which were customer facing – implemented in Oracle (formerly BEA) WebLogic and some in JBoss and JRun, the company made the strategic choice to standardize on IBM WebSphere. Another goal for the environment was to have centralized administration and monitoring of the Java applications – to avoid challenges and risks when applications were not running efficiently.  With a high degree of application performance and availability demanded by its users, it was an aspect they couldn’t afford to ignore. 

This financial institution therefore felt it important that the improvements include a monitoring solution for ongoing usage as well as to troubleshoot and debug the major migration effort.

SOLUTION

While migrating their online banking, teller and back-office applications to an IBM WebSphere infrastructure, the company felt it was of key importance to proactively create a sophisticated monitoring system to identify problems and ensure a successful “go live.”  The financial institution selected IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for WebSphere Application Server (ITCAM) to meet this requirement.  ITCAM gave the company complete visibility into the applications during the migration process to assist with troubleshooting, debugging, production rollout, and production reliability.  With ITCAM they were able to isolate performance bottlenecks and generate alerts when exceptions happened.

Key metrics around volume, transaction time and peak usage also empowered this customer to spot trends and make business and IT decisions in real-time.  The ability to accurately and intelligently understand usage and capacity has made it possible to remain streamlined and keep the infrastructure appropriately sized. Without ITCAM, the company would need to be overly cautious and oversize their environments to stay ahead of the growth curve.  The IT team can also now leverage metrics to support bringing in more IT infrastructure during capacity planning.

The financial institution’s environment included a large number of applications from 3rd party vendors.  An additional benefit to using ITCAM was to arm their development and QA teams with the ability to pinpoint, to these vendors, any bottlenecks or problems caused by those applications.  The company has welcomed increased problem resolution and gratitude by providing vendors with specific feedback on their products which has also enabled improvements to be made.  ITCAM gave them the “proof” needed to demonstrate to a granular level the bottleneck or issue requiring resolution. 

Using ITCAM has provided stability, reliability, efficiency, and “peace of mind.” Eliminating downtime and forecasting bottlenecks and trouble spots at the application level raises this financial institution’s customer confidence and solidifies their leading edge reputation.  The company has made it a priority to invest in an IT infrastructure, network and set of applications that would provide their customers with top quality service — that’s a win-win solution you can take all the way to the bank.