Metropolitan boosts infrastructure efficiency above 99%

The Metropolitan group, JSE-listed New Africa Capital`s (NAC) wholly owned financial services company, has implemented an enterprise monitoring system that has boosted its corporate IT infrastructure performance to above 99% availability.

According to Gerhard van Rensburg, Network Services manager at Metropolitan, the remaining percent represents technical problems generally beyond the company`s control.

"Technology plays an increasingly important role in providing financial services to Metropolitan`s clients so we need to ensure that our IT systems are operating at maximum efficiency," says Van Rensburg. "In our business, proactivity is key and we therefore need real-time monitoring capabilities, as well as access to reports and data so we can make informed decisions about where to invest to maximise capacity and efficiency."

Metropolitan`s Network Services team is responsible for ensuring that the local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and Microsoft servers provide a high degree of availability. Given the scale of Metropolitan`s business in southern Africa - head office in Cape Town, over 100 branches countrywide, 12 branches in Namibia and some in Botswana and Lesotho - the proactive monitoring in-house would require a significant investment to manage the numerous infrastructure components.

Metropolitan required a self-service, Web-based solution accessible via the Metropolitan intranet. It would need to deliver a centralised view of the status of the selected managed devices, as well as a system of health indexes. At a glance the technical team needed to see an overall picture of the managed devices on the corporate network and detect any faulty service.

Comparex Africa was appointed to develop the solution for Metropolitan following an evaluation process of a number of suppliers in the industry. According to Van Rensburg, Metropolitan selected Comparex Africa because of its ability to provide a cost-effective solution tailored to Metropolitan`s requirements.

"Leading-edge technology was important to us, as well as a partner who understood our business challenges and could build a solution to meet those needs."

Van Rensburg says Comparex was able to deliver quality technology and the right skills and expertise to ensure the enterprise management system would enable reactive and proactive problem-solving. "Thanks to Comparex`s enterprise management system, we now have more operational as well as management information and our network is monitored 24x7," he says.

By leveraging economies of scale and harnessing its technical expertise to combine technologies and solutions, Comparex was able to deliver a solution that maximises cost benefits for Metropolitan.

Comparex developed an `early warning capability` which allows the staff at its Command Centre in Cape Town to anticipate outages and warn Metropolitan`s team in advance. In addition to providing an effective monitoring solution, Comparex focused on building a system that could be a powerful management tool. The system delivers reports and data that are analysed by Comparex experts to identify and record trends, enabling Metropolitan to perform more effective capacity planning, ensuring they invest only when and where it is necessary.

Stephen Little, Comparex`s Western Cape head of Managed Services, says he and his team focus on a client-centric approach. "We understand that technical expertise is a minimum requirement for our clients - what they are looking for is service excellence. We combine these two elements to deliver solutions that are geared to adding value to client`s business processes and maximising return on investment."