Akibia Data Center Solutions Customer Case Study: A Leading Financial Services Firm Increases Data Center Efficiencies and Reduces IT Support Costs by Over $1 Million with Akibia

As a major financial brokerage firm, Akibia’s customer puts significant requirements on its data center, including demanding the highest level of uptime for mission critical systems. Because of unique demands resulting from the nature of its business systems, administrators and engineers are prohibited from fixing systems during trading hours. Therefore, the company required a custom support contract for systems maintenance and a flexible partnership with its support vendor. The company was wasting money and time because its existing support vendor was unable to adjust to this schedule.

Because the brokerage firm leverages multiple Sun systems for different applications, with different uptime requirements, they were forced to manage many different SLAs with their existing hardware support vendor. This was cumbersome and difficult to manage, especially because the service provider often missed the SLA requirements. In addition, the management of these many systems and the replacement and addition of new systems was time-consuming and burdensome for the company’s busy IT staff.

In all, these challenges created a situation that was difficult and frustrating. The data center manager understood that switching to a third party support provider that could customize a solution to better fit his unique requirements would not only reduce his frustrations, but also save the company money.

Solution

For a solution to the company’s support issues, the data center manager knew that he had to look beyond the traditional hardware vendors to a third party support provider that would partner with the company to create a flexible and cost-effective support solution. Akibia was that partner. Akibia supports over 130,000 systems worldwide. As a result of this wealth of experience, it was clear that Akibia had the expertise, infrastructure, processes and best practices to best support the company’s needs. Akibia was able to provide a solution that would allow the company to work more efficiently and take advantage of support during off hours.

To address the company’s challenges Akibia listened to their needs and created a unique solution. The solution included a single, customized service level agreement that recognized the off hours in which Akibia would be able to access the data center and fix systems. The single SLA, as opposed to the multiple SLAs the brokerage company was managing with its previous vendor, significantly reduced the administrative burden and lowered support costs for the data center manager and his team. With Akibia, the company will save approximately one million dollars in support costs over three years.

The company reports that Akibia routinely exceeds its SLA, a marked improvement from its last vendor and a direct result of Akibia’s ability to understand unique challenges and present a solution that fits the company’s needs.

In addition, the firm moves quickly to keep pace with demands for high-levels of uptime and embraces innovative technology, making it difficult for the team to maintain an updated record of all the systems in the data center, their warranties and lifecycles. Therefore, Akibia has assumed responsibility for managing the company’s system moves, adds and changes, resulting in more effective and efficient technology lifecycle management.

Results

Millions of dollars worth of electronic transactions cross the company’s systems on a daily basis. The company’s business success, to some degree, can be attributed to their ability to leverage technology. As a result, significant demands are placed on their data center. Working with Akibia has enabled the company to improve systems uptime and enhance the level of service and support provided by their data center for the trading environment – while at the same time realizing approximately one million dollars in cost savings over three years.

With improved service levels and lower overall support costs, the team can now focus on more mission-critical projects, while still continuing to ensure the highest level of system uptime in the trading environment.