HSBC TRINKAUS & BURKHARDT KGAA HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt KGaA is a bank that offers customers in Germany and Luxembourg an array of financial services, including private and commercial banking, corporate investments, and portfolio management. Additionally, HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt offers interest and currency management. The company maintains its headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany with branches in Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, and Frankfurt, and a subsidiary in Luxembourg. Founded in 1785 as a private bank, HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt is today a member of HSBC Holdings PLC, an international financial services organization based in London. The company has 1,500 employees. Challenge—Proactively Monitor and Manage Complex IT Systems The availability of mission-critical applications is mandatory to operate in the financial services industry anywhere in the world and crucial in any company to employee productivity. Knowing this, systems administrators at HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt made infrastructure management a top priority. By strengthening how the company monitored IT resources and responded to problems, administrators felt that they could make a significant impact on their company's success. A major area of concern for administrators was monitoring systems across a number of platforms—Microsoft Windows NT®, Microsoft Windows® 2000, Sun Solaris, Linux and z/OS. At the time, administrators had to develop scripts to monitor IT resources under each platform and check the systems frequently for problems. Often, users were the first to report that a problem existed, placing administrators in an awkward position. To make matters worse, administrators typically did not learn of server problems that occurred outside of standard business hours. If a problem arose at night or on weekends, workers were stranded, with no access to IT resources. The larger issue was there was no centralized event management and no escalation procedure implemented for the distributed platforms. This had to change. Administrators also struggled to manage about 1,300 workstations and 100 laptops running Microsoft Windows NT and Microsoft Windows 2000. The company's previous approach to software distribution did not provide the flexibility and capacity the company needed, slowing the distribution of new application services to users and increasing the workload on administrators. Similarly, the company's lack of an inventory and centralized remote control solution hampered the efforts of help-desk staff, lengthening response time. With a variety of operating systems and a large number of applications in use, HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt began evaluating framework-based solutions that would help increase availability of its mission-critical applications and provide better service to IT users. Solution—Managing Diverse IT Assets with Tivoli Software The company selected Tivoli software from IBM, based on its comprehensive approach to infrastructure management and its autonomic management functions. Systemcall Ingenieurgesellschaft GmbH, Düsseldorf, an IBM Business Partner, provided enterprise systems management design and implementation services and trained HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt staff on the Tivoli implementation. Today, administrators use IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, IBM Tivoli NetView for z/OS, IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager, and IBM Tivoli Remote Control. The autonomic features of these Tivoli products, which help IT environments become more and more self-managing and resolve mundane IT issues automatically, are essential in helping administrators effectively manage the company's distributed resources. For example, the self-healing capabilities of Tivoli Monitoring help administrators detect and automatically recover from critical system problems across an estimated 145 servers. These servers are distributed among the bank's branch offices and its headquarters and support everything from office productivity applications, such as Lotus Notes®, to essential banking and financial applications. Tivoli Monitoring 3.7 also helps administrators monitor the company's clustered environment that hosts its trading applications. Tivoli Enterprise Console integrates alerts from Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli NetView for z/OS, which gathers event data about mainframe-based applications including IBM DB2, IBM WebSphere MQ (formerly IBM MQSeries®) and proprietary trading applications. Tivoli Enterprise Console also integrates alerts from a third-party network management product. As a result, administrators have a single view to system, application, and network events across both mainframe and distributed environments. Using policy-based rules for escalation management, a self-healing feature of the software, Tivoli Enterprise Console alerts administrators when a problem occurs by a predefined method—from pop-up error messages to email alerts to automatic paging. The self-healing capabilities of Tivoli software help HSBC to be more proactive in managing their environment. IT staff can monitor distributed applications more easily, correlate events and resolve issues before they affect the end users. To support configuration and operations management, HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt has deployed Tivoli Configuration Manager and Tivoli Remote Control. The company uses Tivoli Configuration Manager to gather hardware and software information on its more than 1,400 PCs through weekly scans. The data is used to support help-desk, software distribution, and software licensing activities. Tivoli Configuration Manager also helps administrators efficiently distribute new software updates, including upgrading employee workstations from Microsoft Windows NT to Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. Tivoli Remote Control gives help-desk analysts secure, reliable and centralized control over user workstations. Help-desk staff no longer needs to dispatch personnel to branch offices to resolve user problems. At the same time that HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt implemented Tivoli software, the company launched a new enterprise-wide initiative called GEOS™ (Global Entity Online System). GEOS, developed by SDS (Software Daten Service Vienna), is a state-of-the-art software product for high-speed, real-time, straight-through processing of large volumes of securities transactions including online securities account management. This major reorganization optimizes mission critical business processes. In addition, GEOS allows HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt to offer transaction banking services to other banks. The insourcing from third parties' securities businesses is key to cost-efficient improvement. Tivoli software has become a fundamental component of this initiative and is helping administrators understand the impact of IT on bank operations. The company has created a road map of about 200 essential business processes, following each process from initiation to completion across all applications and platforms. Currently, HSBC uses Tivoli Enterprise Console to group and correlate events for each process and provide a comprehensive business view of IT events. Results—Banking Time and Money The company is realizing many benefits and cost savings with the implementation of IBM's Tivoli software. For example, enterprise systems management has become much easier, helping improve staff productivity. Project managers can now have more time to proactively plan new projects. The autonomic features of Tivoli software provide the bank with substantial cost savings and help increase the availability of systems and applications. Take the self-healing features of Tivoli Monitoring. In the past, administrators had to look at each server to see whether it was running or not, and then initiate a fix if necessary. Now, Tivoli software informs administrators when problems arise and, in many cases, automatically tries to recover the system in a failure situation. Likewise, the self-healing features of Tivoli Configuration Manager can automatically reinitiate software distributions that are not successfully completed. Previously, administrators frequently had to redistribute application updates to workstations because of distribution problems. With the Tivoli Configuration Manager, the bank can distribute software updates to more workstations simultaneously without wasting manpower. Future—Comprehensive Business Impact Management HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt is currently evaluating Tivoli Business Systems Manager, now that administrators have more than 200 business process event groups to manage through Tivoli Enterprise Console. Tivoli Business Systems Manager uses daily operational data to build a resource map that illustrates how a specific resource outage affects a particular business process, line of business, or SLA. The use of the Linux operating system is also becoming more important for HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt as it works to consolidate applications running on several UNIX-based systems onto a single system, helping lower hardware costs and boost system performance. Because Tivoli software supports many different platforms, including Linux, the bank can implement new platforms without acquiring new systems management tools. | 
