CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY Itaú BBA to safeguard business operations and financial transactions with CA Service Assurance solutions CUSTOMER PROFILE Industry: Financial services Company: Itaú BBA Grupo Itaú Unibanco Employees: 3.000 BUSINESS Itaú BBA is the wholesale banking arm of the Itaú Unibanco group. It provides treasury and investment banking services to companies with annual turnover of more than US$100 million. CHALLENGE To safeguard service quality, Itaú BBA needed to detect and resolve incidents regarding IT availability in a shorter timeframe. SOLUTION The bank selected a CA Service Assurance platform to provide improved performance management and visibility of services and transactions, enabling root cause analysis, event correlation and problem prioritization. BENEFIT Itaú BBA will be able to detect and resolve IT problems in a shorter timeframe. This will improve service quality, minimize business downtime that can impact customers transactions. agility made possible
Business Personalized wholesale banking services Itaú BBA is the Wholesale, Investment and Treasury banking arm of the Itaú Unibanco group, the largest financial conglomerate in Brazil, and one of the biggest in the world by market value. Itaú BBA customers are comprised of companies with an annual turnover/revenue of more than US$ 100 million; it serves globally around 3,100 of the major enterprises in Latin America, as well as around 700 institutional investors. The service portfolio of Itaú BBA includes investments in assets, advising on mergers and acquisitions, IPO, securitization, derivatives, cash management, financing and guarantees, among others. Present in the world s major financial centers, Itaú BBA has been rated as investment grade by Standard & Poor s. Its main goal is to become the best wholesale, investment and treasury bank in Latin America. As a wholesale bank, Itaú BBA needs to understand its customers and their respective markets to provide compelling products and services. From an investment perspective, this includes helping companies to obtain funds in variable or fixed income, in public or private capital markets and through mergers and acquisitions. In its role as an institutional treasury, Itaú BBA provides services to the entire Itaú Unibanco group. Itaú BBA plays a key role in the group s liquidity, and is responsible for a number of other activities in addition to its customer-facing services. These include establishing the pricing structures for the commercial areas of wholesale, retail and capital market; generating results through active administration of market risks; structuring and executing the funding of the conglomerate; and consolidating all macroeconomic research data used in the bank. Challenge Understanding the business and customer impact of IT downtime To maximize efficiency and prevent outages, Itaú BBA needed to optimize even more its IT service management processes to guarantee the shortest resolution time for incidents. According to Marcelo Lourenço, IT Director at Itaú BBA, the initial focus was to ensure full monitoring of the infrastructure, with the final goal of a complete IT service management strategy. It was hard to relate infrastructure event alerts to specific business services. Problem diagnosis was complex, recalls Lourenço. The bank s IT team was using several monitoring tools, without any means of centralizing or correlating the different alerts. Thus, a failure in a single device generated several alerts in the various tools from multiple components. We would lose precious minutes in analyzing the root cause of the problem and reconstructing the correct sequence of the different alerts, Lourenço comments. 02
Given this scenario, many alerts were only seen by staff responsible for that tool. Lourenço says that Itaú BBA also lacked overall visibility of the end user experience. We needed greater user sensitivity to ensure we were notified of problems with specific services. It was only after this notification that we could analyze the environment. It was hard to relate infrastructure event alerts to specific business services. Marcelo Lourenço IT director, Itaú BBA To safeguard IT service quality to its customers, Itaú BBA decided to: Establish a single platform for the monitoring of infrastructure services and systems Simplify the operation of its infrastructure monitoring and management activities Enable a service view to better manage the user experience Reduce the time to solve incidents and problems Work proactively to prevent incidents and problems Create a multi-disciplinary team to handle all IT service and infrastructure events. Solution Better visibility aids incident prevention and resolution With the scope defined, the bank s IT team embarked on a thorough selection and tender process. After comparing the solutions available and collecting testimonies from customers using the different tools, the bank selected CA Technologies. We chose CA Technologies for three reasons: it offered the best solution for IT service monitoring ; received the best feedback from the customers we visited; and offered an excellent cost to benefit ratio, reveals Lourenço, from Itaú BBA. 03
The CA Service Assurance solution is founded on a number of products, including: CA Infrastructure Management CA Application Performance Management (APM) CA Services Operations Insight. The CA Services division played an important role in the implementation, facilitating knowledge transfer and a great partnership approach. As Lourenço confirms, It is no use buying the best solution if you do not have a great partner for the implementation, training and transfer of knowledge. A problem is directed to the right support teams for resolution, saving time and resources. Marcelo Lourenço IT director, Itaú BBA Itaú BBA currently uses the CA Infrastructure Manager (IM) platform to monitor more than 1,000 network devices, which helps improve availability through rapid problem detection and resolution. We noticed a dramatic improvement in the correlation between the alerts and our ability to identify the root cause of the problem, which has greatly reduced the time spent analyzing incidents, Lourenço comments. Using CA Application Performance Management, Itaú BBA has also been able to monitor transactions made on the bank s most strategic applications With this solution, we will be able to stop the problem from even occurring, Lourenço says. CA Services Operations Insight will help Itaú BBA prioritize its response to daily event alerts, thanks to the solution s ability to correlate and analyze events from different domain managers. Alarms will only be generated if a certain business service shows unavailability, breakdown or risk. With automated root cause analysis, it will be possible to ensure the problem is directed to the right support teams for resolution, saving time and resources and safeguarding quality of service, comments Lourenço. In addition, CA Services Operations Insight will help Itaú BBA manage its infrastructure from a business service perspective. A customized service panel will display status updates in real time, such as service quality, risk, availability and compliance with service level agreements. 04
Administrators will be able to use the panel to drill down to more operational metrics, including analysis of impact, details of alerts and automated corrective actions. Previously our various tools and consoles showed different versions of the same problem. With CA Service Operations Insight, we will have a single pane of glass into IT service quality, says Lourenço. Administrators will be able to use the panel to drill down to more operational metrics, including analysis of impact, details of alerts and automated corrective actions. Previously our various tools and consoles showed different versions of the truth; with CA Service Operations Insight, we will have a single pane of glass into IT service quality, says Lourenço. Benefit Safeguarding financial transactions with real-time IT service management Although the implementation of the CA Infrastructure Management platform is yet to be completed, Itaú BBA has already achieved significant benefits. For example, it has greatly reduced instances of IT downtime that could impact critical business services.. Once all the solutions are fully deployed, Itáu BBA hopes to be able to: Create a real-time model of services across various IT environments Prioritize the most critical services and understand which infrastructure assets require the highest investment of resource Provide greater IT availability and performance, thereby offering excellent working conditions so that the business areas can successfully process transactions. We are confident we will be able to provide user groups with an excellent return, based on the wide range of information that will be generated by the CA Technologies solutions, adds Lourenço. The CA Service Assurance platform will give us accurate visibility of how IT services are being delivered. Marcelo Lourenço IT director, Itaú BBA 05
The involvement of CA Services in the project also delivered benefits to Itaú BBA. As Lourenço explains, CA Services demonstrated an excellent level of knowledge, seamless coordination of activities with our technical team, and a real sense of partnership, which was fundamental to understanding our needs and priorities. He continues, The partnership with CA Technologies is based on a long-lasting and strong relationship, as we are both seeking the same success. It is not like a mere supplier, which we can choose and change when we wish. By March 2012, Itaú BBA wants the monitoring of the bank s four most critical services to be in operation. As a wholesale, investment and treasury bank, we process a smaller volume of transactions but of a higher financial value. Our IT department needs to support the entire business and handle each one of these transactions differently, guaranteeing availability, quality and performance. We are confident that the CA Service Assurance platform will give us accurate visibility of how IT services are being delivered, with all the transparency and reliability expected by the business, concludes Lourenço. Copyright 2012 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. The information and results illustrated here are based upon the speaker s experiences with the referenced software product in a variety of environments, which may include production and nonproduction environments. Past performance of the software products in such environments is not necessarily indicative of the future performance of such software products in identical, similar or different environments. CA does not provide legal advice. Neither this document nor any software product referenced herein serves as a substitute for your compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statute, regulation, rule, directive, standard, policy, administrative order, executive order, and so on (collectively, Laws ) referenced herein or any contract obligations with any third parties. You should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any such Laws or contract obligations. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. 06