Customer Focus Story

Illumix helps major investment bank save $20Mn over 3 years

Illumix was appointed by a leading investment bank to assist them with its IT rationalization project. Like many businesses, relentless growth has necessitated the rapid implementation of many new business systems, often without the time or resources for a considered evaluation of spare capacity within their existing infrastructure. The practical result has been an excess of IT assets and cost requiring rationalization and optimization

Key Challenges

• Data centers full to capacity from old or little used servers still connected
• Wide area networks with an inefficient and expensive excess of network capacity
• Asset and application recording systems and processes that are now inaccurate and unreliable;
• No single source of information about the implication or effects of outages

Years had been spent developing asset registers and populating a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) but to little effect: too many data entry points, no co-ordination of resource allocation and usage, and inconsistent updating of records meant that the data was not accurate and not trusted. The cost implications were huge: many millions of Euros wasted every year in excess capacity, outages that took too long to fix, and new systems that could not be implemented because of a lack of capacity.

To effect this rationalization, the bank required an accurate, comprehensive and maintainable view of all their IT hardware and software assets, of the business applications that are on them, who uses them, how they are each connected, how much data each one communicates, and in summary how much each system and application costs to run.

Illumix's Solution

Illumix performed its IT asset discovery and built a multi-dimensional connectivity model. This quickly exposed gaps in the client’s knowledge of the infrastructure and IT usage, reporting by business unit in each location. Holistic models and individual server and application reports showed how each server and application was connected to other servers and applications and user communities and how much data each was shipping.

The Benefits

• Reduce the cost of running the global WAN
• Provide new and better WAN MIS reporting with empirical evidence of usage and cost models
• Enable IT and Network Engineering to “see the wood for the trees” and identify which business applications are profitable and support the business and which ones are to be accelerated or given priority
• Risk avoidance and supporting the ITIL/ITSM programme, especially in service delivery and business continuity planning through understanding the implications of which business units would be affected by outages to circuits or servers and applications.