case study
AT A GLANCE
Organization
FIDUCIA Group
Industry
Financial services
Staff
Approx. 2,900 (2007)
IT Competence Center
5 zSeries (51,988 MIPs),
3,675 servers, 534 TB disk
capacity
LeuTek products used
ZIS System, ZISGUI
Website
www.fiducia.de
The FIDUCIA Group, based
in Karlsruhe, Germany, is
one of the leading IT service providers in Germany
as well as IT Competence
Center and largest IT
service provider in the cooperative financial services
network. The FIDUCIA
core competences are the
operation of data centers at
a maximum security level
as well as developing and
implementing integrated IT
solutions. For monitoring
the complete IT infrastructure and IT systems, FIDUCIA uses the ZIS System and ZISGUI by
LeuTek as central tools.
leutek products provide enterprise-wide monitoring
Business Process Monitoring at FIDUCIA
The Challenges
Why LeuTek has been chosen
• Consolidate heterogeneous mainframe
structure and monitor servers, networks,
and mainframes in a transparent and centralized manner
• Represent service chains to monitor business processes efficiently
• Logistic and technical challenges due to
large amount of data, complex processes,
intended data quality and a large number of
persons involved
• Very good experiences with LeuTek as reliable, flexible and long-standing expert, e.g.
at rbg from 1992 to 2004 (ZIS System)
• Features, integratability, visualization functions
• Easy operability, low administration effort
• Comprehensive field experience
Project Milestones
• Replace legacy systems and opt for an external standard system for centralized monitoring in multiple stages starting in 2004
• ZISGUI deployment after successful pilot
project for eBanking business process as
well as migration to ZIS System 5.0
• Since 2006 successive integration of additional business processes
• Since 2008 set up a configuration management database as information source for
monitoring
Benefits
• Hardware failures dropped due to early
detection of incidents, e.g. by 90 percent for
Solaris systems
• Generally shorter communication paths,
more efficient usage of resources, clear
mapping of IT components to business processes by representing service chains
• Clear, documented processes, high system
stability and availability with > 99.9 percent
• ZIS product family creates optimized IT operation as centralized overall system
Consolidation After Expansion
In times that are dominated by cross-company
activities, mergers, and acquisitions transparent
and cost-efficient IT structures are the basis for
a sustained competitive advantage. The merger
of the FIDUCIA AG with rbg, Rechenzentrale
Bayerischer Genossenschaften eG, to form FIDUCIA IT AG increased monitoring challenges
to harmonize existing systems and structures
in order to create the transparency required for
monitoring the complete IT infrastructure in a
centralized manner.
The mergers resulted in a heterogeneous system
landscape with a large number of mainframes.
Therefore, the mainframes needed to be consolidated and monitored by an overall solution.
It was opted in favor of the LeuTek product ZIS
System as basis tool.
Homogeneous Information
In spring 2004, the ZIS System was extended to
cover the complete FIDUCIA group. Implementation was smooth. The systems were integrated
successively. To transparently represent the IT
topology and to appropriately serve their customers in the open systems world, FIDUCIA decided in 2005 to expand the ZIS System by the
graphical tool ZISGUI. It was meant to illustrate
the complete service chains intuitively including
realtime monitoring information. The persons in
charge opted for eBanking as pilot project to serve as sample process. The active cooperation of
various expert centers of the customer was required to map the components to the pertaining
business processes and to identify dependencies. Since the service level of a transaction depends on the availability of many components
such as web servers, firewall, load balancer,
application servers, or mainframe systems. Ad-
ditionally, accesses may come from diverse directions: via internet, from the bank and from the
call center. Within four months only, the eBanking
process was fully implemented. The experience
gained served as a basis to successively integrate additional core processes starting in 2006,
such as the standard banking system agree BAP.
FIDUCIA Close Monitoring Gap
In the meantime, about 90 percent of the
overall vertical integration – from network to
server – are monitored in a centralized manner. Five mainframes and 4,000 server systems
are connected to the ZIS System. A monitoring
coverage of 98 percent seems to be realistic al-though the number of systems develops
dynam-ically and the maintenance of existing
processes is time-consuming. The ZIS System
as such is critical for the processes at FIDUCIA. Therefore, availability is designed for more
than 99.9 percent by consequently using backup systems. Those colleagues who experience
the advantages of an "umbrella system" for cen-
tralized monitoring in their daily work provide positive feedback. Concretely, hardware failures of
Solaris systems dropped by 90 percent due to
early detection of incidents. Graphical process
monitoring also is a milestone visualizing incidents. This allows to identify problem components quickly. In the future, FIDUCIA intend to
continue their policy towards an integral business service management: They want to optimize
seamless monitoring of their business processes
by a configuration management database by
2009. By the push of a button, consolidated information is provided on all levels over a large
number of interfaces – extracted knowledge for
significantly increased productivity.
"Given our very complex
and heterogeneous
IT infrastructure, we
could not afford taking
any risks when it came
to opt for an overall
monitoring solution. With
the ZIS product line, we
decided in favor of a
field-proven, flexible tool
set that had been successfully employed at
our sites in Nuremberg
and Kassel. Together
with the technology
partner LeuTek, this
allowed us to put our
ideas pragmatically into
practice to optimize
business process monitoring."
Carsten Pfläging, IT
operation manager at
FIDUCIA IT AG
LeuTek GmbH • Stadionstraße 4- 6 • 70771 Leinfelden-Echterdingen • Germany
Phone: +49 711 94707- 0 • Fax: +49 711 799177 • Internet: www.leutek.de • E-Mail: [email protected]