BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
Cloud-based solution designed to align IT resources with business service demand
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Company Overview
Based in the UK, Nationwide is the world's largest building society. Its 16 million members have a current account, mortgage, or savings product and are, therefore, members of the Society. Nationwide is owned by its members and focuses on providing banking products and services to its customers. It is the UK's third largest mortgage provider and holds almost £1 in every £10 saved in the UK, as well as one in ten of the UK's current accounts.
Like all modern financial service providers, Nationwide is faced with high consumer expectations, such as 24x7 banking from the palm of their hand, and a massive uptick of smaller transactions due to the consumer preference for digital over cash payments. These combined behaviors put increased demand and pressure on Nationwide’s backend systems.
“When you make a payment, you expect it to be transferred immediately,” says Peter Norris, Process Owner, IT Service Demand and Capacity Management at Nationwide. “If we don't have enough capacity, the service is either going to be very slow or unavailable, leading to unhappy members.”
Nationwide Building Society enhances customer access with capacity management.
The Challenge
Ensuring a brilliant customer experience for its members is Nationwide's number one priority, but achieving that goal meant overcoming several challenges. Capacity planning was federated to individual teams, who relied on a custom-built solution that was extremely difficult to maintain. This siloed approach resulted in a lack of visibility across the organization and kept it in reactive mode.
“We couldn’t easily forecast; the custom solution was maintained on a best-effort basis, and we often relied on event management alerts to make us aware of potential capacity issues,” explains Norris.
We had a lot of requirements from a capacity modeling perspective, and BMC Helix Capacity Optimization was far and away the best solution for us.
In addition, Nationwide needed a singular view of its entire environment, including 6,000 servers and multiple operating systems. Without it, tracking capacity at an enterprise level was nearly impossible. The added challenge was finding the sweet spot—if Nationwide had too much available capacity, it would face additional (unnecessary) costs. On top of that, Nationwide needed to ensure it could meet highly regulated industry standards.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Nationwide decided to upgrade from its custom on-premises system to a cloud solution that could handle the organization’s complex IT estate encompassing Windows, Linux, Solaris, and AIX operating systems, as well as integrations with multiple observability solutions such as SCOM, Dynatrace, and VMware. After evaluating several vendors, Nationwide selected BMC Helix Capacity Optimization, which delivers robust forecasting, modeling, and extrapolation functionalities that made it stand out.
Overnight, we could literally see thousands of servers pushing metrics into BMC Helix Capacity Optimization. Today, we can see the capacity position of the majority of our IT estate from a single point.
“We had a lot of requirements from a capacity modeling perspective, and BMC Helix Capacity Optimization was far and away the best solution for us,” says Norris. “The implementation went very well. Overnight, we could literally see thousands of servers pushing metrics into BMC Helix Capacity Optimization. Today, we can see the capacity position of the majority of our IT estate from a single point.”
No longer in reactive mode, Nationwide uses BMC Helix Capacity Optimization for long-term capacity management and medium-term operational capacity management, and on an ad-hoc project basis to compare capacity baselines from before and after deployments.
“If we want to stand by the decisions we're making, we've got to trust the data,” says Norris. “Now, the data is in BMC Helix Capacity Optimization, so the system can consolidate and highlight what's pertinent. Getting to this point was critical.”
The Results
BMC Helix Capacity Optimization has already made a transformational impact on the mutual organization. A small IT team can now manage Nationwide’s capacity needs from a single pane of glass. With its new, centralized way of working, Nationwide has a consistent, repeatable, and high-quality process for capacity planning, enabling the organization to meet regulatory requirements six months ahead of schedule.
“Before BMC Helix Capacity Optimization, my team could not do what it does today,” says Norris. “Not only can we see weeks and months into the future, but we can also filter out the noise so the team can focus on the potential capacity issues before any issues arise.”
Not only can we see weeks and months into the future, but we can also filter out the noise so the team can focus on the potential capacity issues before any issues arise.
The move to BMC Helix Capacity Optimization has enabled the team to slash triage time from two days every week to just one hour a week, freeing them to focus on more value-added work. And the benefits have rippled throughout the entire IT organization. Other support teams across Nationwide no longer spend as much time capacity planning and can instead deliver new functionality and innovation for the rest of the business.
Following the initial go live, Nationwide collaborates regularly with BMC product and support teams to continually improve the solution. “We feel like we know BMC, and they know us as well,” says Norris. “They’re consistently adding capabilities into the tool to make it better for us. I know when we go live with a new version, I’ll see some of the functionality we’ve suggested because BMC truly listens.”
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