Enterprise technology solutions provider Blue Turtle Technologies recently worked with vendor partner Nastel Technologies, a premier global provider of enterprise-grade middleware and application performance monitoring (APM) solutions, to deliver Nastel AutoPilot at specialist bank and asset manager Investec. The solution is being used in the company's corporate and institutional banking (ICIB) business units in South Africa and the UK.
The ICIB trading and treasury operations within Investec span FX trading, equity derivatives trading, equity derivatives sales and structuring, interest-rate trading, money market, and other financial products.
At this stage, trade origination messaging traffic represents 133 000 daily transaction flows, which involves settlements, CRM, ECM (enterprise content management), payments, and reconciliation applications, all of which are heavily reliant upon a middleware messaging backbone in a distributed systems environment to execute effectively.
The business challenge
When unpacking the challenges faced by its ICIB Data Services team, Jason Ho, ICIB Infrastructure Manager at Investec in South Africa, highlighted that the business lacked visibility into overall transaction flows across mission-critical applications.
The team further surmised that it did not have in-depth tools for operational monitoring and management capabilities for its middleware stack and it needed a way to access message payloads and track wayward transactions.
Furthermore, compliance could become an issue with its current environment and it needed a comprehensive message audit capability to satisfy both internal and external auditors, before it presented an operational risk.
In order to address these challenges, Investec identified that it would need the fast implementation of a robust highly scalable solution, which is when it engaged Blue Turtle Technologies, a respected South African technology consulting firm with a vendor agnostic approach to solutions.
After a survey of all available options, Nastel's AutoPilot was selected to replace several well-known APM vendors and freeware products already in its environment.
The solution
The AutoPilot technology advised by Blue Turtle Technologies, provided Investec with a solution that affords it in-depth message tracking and application monitoring, covering middleware management and audit compliance, as well as an integrated single-pane-of-glass view of all critical metrics and functions.
Along with fault detection, problem resolution, and reporting tools, AutoPilot with its built-in analytics also provided proactive round-the-clock alerts via SMS text and e-mail.
"At Investec, high availability and reliability is absolutely critical because of the amount of money each transaction carries within our integrated trading environment.
AutoPilot plays an instrumental role ensuring these transactions are delivered on time, with any breaks in continuity caught and corrected instantly. With Autopilot, the middleware infrastructure supporting our trading operations runs securely, efficiently, effortlessly, and we meet the stringent data security requirements of internal and external auditors," said Ho.
Additional success
Following on the success of the AutoPilot implementation in South Africa, Investec Bank UK has chosen Nastel AutoPilot to monitor its middleware infrastructure across the corporate and institutional banking (ICIB); wealth and investment; and asset finance business units.
Within ICIB UK Autopilot is used across IT functions covering Enterprise Service Bus, SWIFT and Meridian payments systems. This provides crucial oversight of the IT infrastructure and key applications (supporting trade and payments systems). These are high transaction value systems and in-depth visibility into applications including IBM MQ and IBM Integration Bus estate is crucial to supporting the business.
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