Financial firm Wesleyan Assurance Society has deployed
tools from Tivoli and Alarmpoint Voice from Invoq Systems to
complete the final phase of a three-year operation to bring its IT
systems in-house.
The company, which employs 1,000 people in the UK
and specialises in life, pensions, investments, savings, mortgage
and general insurance, had previously outsourced its IT to Cap
Gemini.
The process of in-sourcing from Cap Gemini started in 2001 and
Wesleyan Assurance is currently in discussions to bring the last
remaining ICL mainframe in-house.
Tony Horsefield, computer operations manager at Wesleyan, said, "We
are in-sourcing the final part of our IT and so require a
supporting infrastructure."
The system management tools will also help the IT department and
business units revise service level agreements to meet business
demand and future plans.
Horsefield said demands on IT were steadily growing. "Our service
level agreement requires us to support [the firm] between 8am and
6pm. But many departments work longer hours and 24x7 operations
cannot be done without the right tools."
The new tools will also help Wesleyan comply with the Financial
Services Authority's requirements for business continuity.
Horsefield said Tivoli would provide Wesleyan with the systems
management capability to monitor its IT and Alarmpoint Voice would
provide automated alerts.
"We want to provide adequate monitoring, software distribution and
asset and inventory management," he said.
Horsefield said he would be assessing Tivoli Netview, a
network-monitoring tool, to monitor network devices remotely.
The system management process is being developed by Elyzium, a
systems integrator specialising in IBM software.