Kensington Mortgages, a FTSE 250-listed specialist
mortgage lender, has begun phasing in systems management software
to gain better control of its sprawling IT infrastructure after 10
years of rapid growth.
The firm, which offers mortgages through intermediaries to
borrowers who cannot meet the lending criteria of traditional
lenders, has about 300 staff and an equivalent number of desktops
spread across seven sites.
But it is also currently managing more than 200 HP servers and
has identified a need to manage its IT assets more strategically to
cope with future development and ensure systems availability.
With initial testing nearly complete, the firm will roll out
tools from CA's Enterprise Systems Management and Business Service
Optimisation software suites by late March to start measuring and
managing its IT environment, rather than relying, as it has in the
past, on short-term tactical fixes.
Sean Catlin, chief infrastructure and security architect at
Kensington Mortgages, said gaining a better view of systems
resources would help minimise system downtime and help the firm
monitor service level agreements as it moves applications to hosted
services providers.
Senior management would also gain a better top-level view of the
business, including a breakdown of the firm's various systems. "In
the past we have dabbled with niche tools, but they did not provide
sufficient business value or benefit," he said.
"The CA tools will provide a real-time view of servers and
status, and group servers together as services, to give a more
strategic view. The tools also enable daily, weekly or monthly
reporting to help us proactively manage our resources rather than
reacting to situations as they arise."
Catlin said the growing complexity of Kensington's IT
infrastructure made the tools a necessity, but it was difficult to
measure the project's return on investment. "Bringing in the system
should cut the time it takes for us to fix problems, but it is hard
to put a figure on the likely gain."
But one measure that would soon be apparent was a likely
reduction in staff costs, he added. "In the past we have had to
regularly use contract staff, but the new systems should give us
more of a fixed cost base."
Mortgage lender's multi-site IT estate
Kensington operates across seven sites, including a head office
in West London, a disaster recovery centre in Southampton and a
recently opened business support centre for 150 staff in
Reading.
Its hardware infrastructure includes a mixture of more than 200
HP DL360s, 380s, 560s and 580s servers. Kensington uses Microsoft
exclusively, with more than 300 desktops running on Windows XP on a
Windows 2003 server.
Its core online mortgage application, Epos, is an in-house
application built on the .net framework on SQL servers. Epos uses
several mortgage engines which are a combination of bespoke and
adapted third-party components.