Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein aims to
slash IT systems management and database support costs by investing
in asset management software.
The software from Tideway Systems, called Foundation 4.6,
compiles information about every system on the network and produces
a report which gives IT directors an overview of their diverse IT
systems and a record of changes made to them.
The software also highlights problems in the performance of
applications and produces a report for managers.
DrKW, the investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank in Germany,
has around 900 IT applications running on more than 3,000 servers
worldwide. Around 6,000 changes to IT systems are documented each
year.
The bank estimates that the Tideway software will cut the cost
of running its large management databases listing its IT assets by
around 85% but would not put a figure on the cost saving.
It made a pre-tax profit of £190m in the first nine months of
2003.
JP Rangaswami, chief information officer at Dresdner, said, "As
a global company with a highly sophisticated IT infrastructure,
this project will remove approximately five-sixths of the cost of
manually maintaining multiple configuration management
databases."
"It will also simultaneously generate significant related
returns attributable to reduced downtime of application and
management overhead in approving changes,” he added.
Between 15 to 50 staff were required to run the management
databases and data had to be inputted manually before the Tideway
sostware was deployed.
Initially the solution will be used to improve Dresdner's
inventory, audit, compliance and change processes in multiple
locations including London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and New York.
Jon Collins, a principal analyst at analyst and research company
Quocirca, said that the Tideway product was useful software that
filled a gap in the market.
“From around 1994 there was the bandwagon for enterprise
management framework software but these systems aren’t very good at
bringing information about diverse information about IT systems
together and giving an overview. These systems aren’t as up-to-date
or as comprehensive as would like,” he said.