Clients

HSBC, Citigroup and BP. Three global organisations with vast IT infrastructures supporting growing business demands at lower costs. Significant competitive pressures driving business innovation at an incredible pace. In fact the pace of change at the business level is so significant that IT with its traditional processes and support infrastructure could not possibly keep up.

For instance in retail banking, the success metrics for products marketed to online consumers and partners are not particularly well understood. To this end, HSBC uses multi-varient techniques to launch a number of financial products with small variations and gauge the customer responses in real-time to these products. Through natural selection, the bank would further launch a variation of the more successful products.

This type of approach, creates significant demand on the IT infrastructure with manual processes taking new content from development all the way through testing, quality assurance and finally into production within minutes.

BP had a slightly different set of challenges. The rate of change from business was significant, however, the additional complexity was that each region supports its own set of operational deployment platforms, further complicating the process of deployment of new content and code. This was further complicated by the fact each region had its own set of operational processes creating further delays and costs in responding to business needs.

Reed Bunting’s approach to all three instances was to construct a solution that abstracted the technical details and focus on the key IT processes required to enable rapid change across the infrastructure.

By segregating the business processes away from technical and infrastructure management issues, these clients were now able to streamline their application release management processes. What transpired across all three organisations was  how the underlying tools and the segregated roles and disciplines within IT had over time changed the fundamental service delivery processes resulting  in  hidden and costly redundant operations and gaps across the service delivery processes.

Process automation and integration software was then used to join up the tools and data pools across the entire change and release management process, there by dramatically reducing manual itervention in the service deliver processes.

This approach  of isolating the business and technical disciplines, not only  enabled all these clients  to create one standard set of processes on a global basis, but also dramatically reduced the time that it takes to deliver new business products for their clients.

Marks & Spencer was looking to consolidate head office space, reduce real estate costs and enable flexible working for employees given 25% reduction in space. Sainsbury’s was looking to revamp its IT platforms to enable the rapid rate of change needed for its e-commerce business. As part of this massive infrastructure upgrade, and to further reduce costs and improve communication between its business divisions, Sainsbury’s (through its partner, Accenture) needed to move to a new head office in Holborn, London.

Our solution was based on abstracting the technical details of  the application stacks and thereby automating the infrastructure services supporting the head office moves successfully and on time.

Although highly regarded across the financial institutions, Reuters was under tremendous pressure from its competitors including Bloomberg to generate additional revenues by targeting its services to a rapidly growing community of day-traders. But this was easier said than done. Reuters’ key application for information delivery is immense in size and complexity, and in order to support its institutional clients. Reuters has a large number of support staff in every major financial district around the world. Clearly this type of client support cannot be offered to day-traders thereby directly impacting  the quality of the new service and the brand.

Our solution was to embed a policy-based self-service capability to the core Reuters application supporting 50 banks and 1m users, eradicating the need to have any physical support presence. This approach not only enabled rapid time to market, but also dramatically reduced the cost of the  initiative.