Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark (RICS): Excellence in Efficiency

Customer

Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark (RICS) is the third largest provider of IT services in the Raiffeisen banking group in Austria. Its clients include 89 independent Raiffeisen banking institutes with 336 branches, as well as external financial services firms. RICS is an independent subsidiary of the Raiffeisen-Landesbank Steiermark AG.

Industry

IT services.

Challenge

In 2009, the RICS data center processed approximately 400 million internet and mobile banking transactions. Such transactions are critical to the success of RICS and its clients. However, the company was challenged to optimize data center uptime and performance without overburdening its staff or driving up costs.

Solution

To improve efficiency in service delivery, RICS sought an integrated, ITIL-aligned IT management solution.

In 2005, RICS implemented HP Business Availability Center (BAC) for end-to-end monitoring of business critical banking processes. Business availability specialists now can quickly identify and eliminate bottlenecks that slow transaction response times. Continuous performance improvements have accelerated banking processes up to 12 percent and improved customer satisfaction.

As the company began adopting ITIL standards in 2006, RICS implemented HP Universal CMDB software and HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Inventory software to support the ITIL framework. Together, the solutions provide full transparency across IT services and their supporting infrastructure. More than five million configuration items and dependencies are mapped in the HP Universal CMDB.

Today, a much larger community can access configuration information, quickly and easily, making RICS more agile in responding to new market demands. Furthermore, integration of the CMDB with HP BAC has alleviated work-intensive root cause analysis and enabled RICS to perform high level impact analysis previously impossible.

RICS also uses HP Network Management Center and HP Operations Center, and are continuing their close collaboration with HP, implementing HP Data Center Automation Center, HP Service Management Center, and HP Storage Essentials software.

"Using HP management software, RICS has improved IT efficiency to such a degree that we're consistently over-fulfilling service level agreements. We're now looking to lift our SLA ratios–a new source of competitive advantage."
- Ulfried Paier, managing director

Outcomes

• Cut average remediation time from one hour to a maximum of 15 minutes–a 75 percent improvement
• With HP Universal CMDB, sped resource gathering time by 50 percent
• Eliminated unauthorized changes between January and June 2009
• Gained ability to deliver 99.99 percent availability for all online banking systems while reducing the number of staff dedicated to its management
• Improved application performance 20 to 30 percent, which accelerated core banking processes by 12 percent
• Earned customer trust through proactive management and reliable SLA compliance
• Cut costs by 30 percent due to automated virtual server management, tiered storage, and integration of HP management solutions within RICS operating processes

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