IBM Server Proven

EXIGENCE Case Study

Friends Provident is a prominent UK financial services group and one of the 100 leading companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange.

Its corporate headquarters are located in Wood Street, Central London, with IT, administrative and customer service hubs in four separate UK locations. Friends Provident's humble beginnings date back to 1832 when it was established in Bradford, Yorkshire by visionary and forward-thinking Quakers to provide life assurance for their members. Today, Friends Provident is a multi-billion dollar organization based around three core businesses:

To support the business, Friends Provident operates and manages networked mainframe z-Series servers, midrange i-Series servers and a host of Windows servers, UNIX web servers and UNIX Tier-1 and Tier-2 application servers. With in excess of 5000 employees to support as well as countless other third party business users such as banks, building societies and Independent Financial Advisors, the ability to maximize service availability is critical.

Andy Rafferty, Senior Technical Consultant at the Friends Provident Dorking installation, agrees. "Typically," says Rafferty, "established application and systems code tends to work without any problem as long as the environment remains stable. However, service availability is immediately vulnerable the moment changes are introduced and, in our business, that is unacceptable. We need to ensure that we are equipped to respond instantly to service interruptions to minimize and, ideally, eliminate outages."

This was of particular importance when Friends Provident began the implementation of an IP network. At the time, the Friends Provident network was predominantly SNA based. However, the move to IP brought a new set of challenges.

Andy Rafferty explains, "Our installed SNA trace facilities were far from perfect but were usable. However, running an IP packet trace was quite a complex process. It was error prone, in terms of capturing the correct data and was also time consuming when performing both trace capture and, more importantly, trace analysis. We needed to find a tool that would enable us to trace problems without these complexities."

Friends Provident readily embraces technology to enhance business performance. In fact, one of the company’s six key business strategy tenets is "Apply technology to improve service, enhance distribution and reduce costs". So, when Rafferty was introduced to EXIGENCE at a GSE (Guide Share Europe) user group meeting, he decided to look more closely at what was on offer. "If we could confirm what other users claimed about the capabilities of EXIGENCE," Rafferty continued, "then it was clear that it had the potential to play a very important role within Friends Provident. EXIGENCE promised significant savings in terms of both trace capture and analysis with associated benefits in application and system availability." And, they were not disappointed.

"The single most important benefit of EXIGENCE," Rafferty explained, "is its ease of use. All other benefits flow from that. EXIGENCE is considerably more efficient than traditional tracing methods. I would estimate that analysing a trace is 5 to 10 times faster with EXIGENCE and, in situations where a problem can result in high cost resources lying idle until it is fixed, savings can be significant. Whether we are attempting to implement new systems or running an offsite disaster recovery test, EXIGENCE has a key role to play in ensuring our responsiveness."

But there are additional benefits which Rafferty is also keen to point out. "Because of it’s ease of use and efficiency, EXIGENCE is also an excellent educational tool. Traces are no longer invoked as a last resort but can now be used routinely to evaluate problems of a less critical nature. This has helped accelerate the skills-sets and responsiveness of our networking personnel as well as the process of systems maintenance and development."

"And," Rafferty concludes, "despite the fact that EXIGENCE is only used directly by a small team of technicians, its benefits are felt throughout the organization. EXIGENCE has proved itself to be an excellent investment for Friends Provident. "