Customer Profiles
Co-operative Financial Services Lays Foundation for End-to-end Infrastructure Management Using Entuity Eye of the Storm

Managing its network effectively is key for any organisation, but when a merger or acquisition has recently taken place, as in the case of Co-operative Financial Services, it becomes a much bigger issue. Previously independent networks need to integrate successfully in order to allow the IT infrastructure to work efficiently and support the business function.

Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) was formed by the merging of two individual organisations - Co-operative Insurance Society and the Co-operative Bank (including smile, the Internet bank). It now offers a complete range of financial products, ranging from online and high street banking to credit cards and insurance. The company has more than 10,000 employees who are spread out among eight large offices and 99 bank branches, plus 25 remote locations for the insurance division. Previously, the individual companies ran two separate networks, but as a result of the merger, these have been integrated into one.

The new single network now handles applications including financial management tools; call centres for the banking and insurance divisions; all of the software and security for smile; and mainframe applications. As well as running an increased number of systems, the infrastructure also has to support more offices and employees. As a result, it was decided that network management software was required to assist with monitoring of traffic, tracking devices and identifying any faults quickly.

To choose which software to deploy, CFS identified its requirements internally and used these to carry out a paper evaluation on six of the leaders in the network management industry, as identified by analyst houses Gartner and Forrester. This produced a shortlist of two products, which were put into a proof-of-concept trial. Entuity's network management software, EYE of the Storm 4.0 (EYE), most closely matched the criteria laid out by CFS and proved to be the obvious choice.

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