Allianz, one of the UK's leading insurance groups, has grown dramatically and increased its profitability substantially over the last four years. The group's IT systems, and in particular the role of Performance Management and Capacity Planning, have become increasingly important during this period. Roy Cawthra, Technical Services Manager at Allianz: "Performance Management is essential in ensuring that we have IT systems which are responsive to the highly competitive environment in which we operate. Careful Capacity Planning ensures that we are able to control IT costs and only buy what we need, exactly when we need it."

Although Allianz is a long-standing user of Metron's Athene software, Roy Cawthra believes that the product is now more important than ever before. It is being used to provide regular capacity plans across all the company's diverse hardware platforms, for server consolidation projects, virtualisation, modeling, consolidation of multiple data centres to a single location, and as part of the group's drive to introduce more ITIL® -based processes.

Athene for virtualisation
In 2002, Roy Cawthra was responsible for some 2,500 users located throughout the UK . Four years later, the number of users has grown to 4,000 including an Allianz -owned company in India which employs five hundred staff. The company's systems range from a Z900 mainframe, through HP UNIX, Intel servers and AS400s. Metron's Athene is used across all these different platforms.

Although the number of physical servers has reduced over the last three or four years, Allianz is making increasing use of logical servers with products such as VMWare, allowing a greater number of applications to be run on a single server. According to Roy Cawthra , Allianz 's approach to the use of virtual servers has been fairly conservative to date. However, he sees the opportunity to use Athene as a means of modeling how many additional applications can be put onto a server. "Previously we used to have one server per application. We now have up to ten applications on each one, but by carrying out some modeling with Athene, this should give us the confidence to be even more aggressive towards our use of virtual machines, and allow us to make additional savings."

Capacity Planning to meet individual business needs
One of the results of Allianz 's acquisitions was the fact that the group also acquired six data centres. Located around the UK and running a wide variety of different applications which had served the needs of the individual companies prior to their acquisition, their consolidation into the single location of Guildford provided Roy Cawthra and his team with a major challenge, not least of which was understanding all the different applications.

Not only was the project completed successfully, but it has also resulted in a major change in the way the businesses operate in terms of Performance Management and Capacity Planning.

"We now carry out regular Capacity Planning for all these different business areas. In the past, they were not managed as closely and their performance relied to a large extent on local people keeping an eye on the systems.

Now we use Athene to produce plans which predict eighteen months capacity, and which the businesses are finding extremely useful. In turn this has enabled us to set up a very productive dialogue between the individual businesses and the IT department."

Businesses are now keen to provide the IT department with details of potential changes in their areas of activity and the introduction of new services which enable Roy Cawthra 's team to model and assess the impact of these changes, discuss them with the individual business and plan what action will need to be taken.

Allianz also introduced HP OpenView for performance monitoring at the time of the data centre consolidation project. Since the completion of this project, Allianz has made considerable use of HP OpenView to collect large amounts of availability and performance data. Roy Cawthra: "Some months ago, we discussed how useful it would be if we could use the data that is collected by HP OpenView for modeling, rather than having to collect it again for Athene to carry out this activity. Metron has worked with HP, and they have developed an interface between the two products. If we go ahead and implement this, it will allow us to make considerable savings in both time and money."

Seeing into the future
The most important benefit that Athene delivers to Allianz, according to Roy Cawthra , is the ability to take a proactive view of potential problems. Using the product's Performance Management and Capacity Planning strengths, he is able to know precisely when one of the group's systems will experience a problem. He can then take the appropriate action before there is any detrimental impact on the business, its users or its customers.

"I believe that the pressure on IT departments, especially in such a competitive marketplace as insurance, will only increase over the coming years. The need to control and, in fact, decrease IT costs will become greater. IT departments will have to become ever more agile and do things much faster to stand any chance of meeting the needs of the business. The only way that we can do this is to have a really good view of the capacity we have available now, and the capacity that will be needed in the future. Metron's Athene gives us this."