FTPalert Case Study
FTPalert - A Sound Investment by SEI
SEI is a leading provider of outsourcing business solutions for investment processing, securities trading, mutual fund processing and asset management to:
- US banks and private trust companies and European private banks
- Professional investment advisers in the US, UK and Canada who serve individual and institutional investors
- Corporations, endowments, foundations, unions and other institutional investors in the US, Canada, UK and South Africa
- US investment managers and alternative investment managers worldwide
SEI is comprised of two parts:
- A Financial/Investment Services company and
- An IT Service Bureau
The Data Centre, known as the ITC, is part of the IT service bureau and houses three physical mainframe processors that are divided into 8 logical partitions (LPAR’s). These machines provide the processing power for the primary mainframe applications based on TSO and CICS. In addition, there are in excess of 300 Windows based servers that support SEI’s client-server based applications and a further dozen Solaris machines that support their Global Information Processing Platform (GIPP). The ITC provides services for more than 5000 users across these hardware platforms with access being provided via a multi-protocol Frame Relay network. Both TCP/IP and SNA/SDLC protocols are supported.
SEI’s Challenge
File transfer is a big part of the SEI financial services operation and was supported solely via a proprietary software package. However, client pressure was forcing SEI to review the way the file transfer operation was controlled. Tony Cieri, Senior Network Engineer at SEI, takes up the story:
“Since FTP comes free on most servers, we had been receiving steady pressure from our client base to consider adopting FTP as the preferred file transfer medium. Unfortunately, our incumbent package is a relatively expensive application and can be difficult to master. As a result, many of our clients did not want to purchase it simply to send files to us or receive files from us although they continued to insist that we support FTP. Despite the fact that, in a production environment, we felt it was neither feasible, because of FTP’s inherent operational and security weaknesses, nor cost-effective, because of the additional cost of upgrading our existing file transfer software, we made a commitment to provide support for FTP. The objective was to be able to support FTP in much the same fashion as we supported our existing utility. We wanted all file transfer processing to be automated to the point that intervention would only be required on an exception basis. We also needed to be able to support the various Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) that our clients demanded.”
The SEI Solution
To achieve their objectives, SEI considered a number of options including the support of FTP on a separate server platform supplemented by third party software. Although this would have enabled the SEI client base to ”get” or “put” any files they needed, SEI decided to evaluate FTPalert on their z/OS platforms; a solution that meant there was no need to invest in additional hardware and that kept the implementation phase simple.
Why FTPalert?
Tony Cieri explains:
“I was aware of William Data Systems. I had previously evaluated the EXIGENCE and RouteView products and was comfortable about evaluating FTPalert. It soon became clear that the design of FTPalert was both simple and straightforward. This was a significant advantage over some of the alternatives which, by comparison, were vastly more complicated in design. That translated into complicated to support, upgrade, debug and, most important from the clients point of view, use. The fact that FTPalert was also less than 25% the cost of the most expensive alternative was also significant.”
However, design and price are not the only factors to be considered when evaluating software. Equally significant are issues of support and functionality. In both cases FTPalert passed with flying colours as Tony Cieri confirms:
“ Despite the fact that we had evaluated other WDS products, we had no direct experience of their support in an operational environment. However, any concerns we might have had were soon dispelled by the unanimously positive feedback we received from the reference calls we made. Practical experience has subsequently confirmed that WDS support is of a very high quality.
The real icing on the cake, however, has been the operational benefits that SEI has realised by implementing FTPalert. FTPalert has been instrumental in making FTP support a reality in our environment. From the moment it was installed, FTPalert addressed major concerns about running FTP in a production environment. In addition, FTPalert has proved invaluable in simplifying operational control, enhancing our ability to audit and report all FTP usage and provide our clients with the service they demand.
FTPalert is the key ingredient that allows you to get the functionality of the expensive file transfer applications without the punitive costs. With FTPalert you get the best of both worlds.”