Case Study

 

When tackling the costs of messaging and collaboration became paramount at one major insurance firm, usage-based cost-allocation was the answer - and DYS Analytics uniquely met the need with a system built using CONTROL! solutions and expertise.

Zurich Financial Services, a $41 billion global insurance-based financial services provider with about 68,000 employees, serves its customers through offices in around 60 countries. A long-time IBM Lotus Domino customer, Zurich handles messaging and replication traffic through a centrally-managed communications network ("backbone") managed by the Group Network Services (GNS) team in Zurich, Switzerland. Individual business units own and manage over 500 servers storing mail and Domino applications. GNS, in turn, routes emails and handles database replication traffic between business units and from/to the Internet via backbone servers located in Schaumburg, Illinois, and Schlieren, Switzerland.

For years, GNS' costs were funded centrally by the corporate IT budget. In late 2001, Zurich's IT board made the decision that the individual business units would be charged for the backbone resources they consumed. As a result, the IT board chartered GNS to implement a usage-based cost-allocation system to equitably assign messaging and replication costs to Zurich business units. GNS, in effect, needed to run its messaging and replication network like a business - charging for usage of the backbone infrastructure while providing the same exceptional Quality of Service (QoS) its users had come to expect.

The requirement for usage-based cost-allocation solutions is becoming increasingly common among large enterprises because they ultimately drive down costs and provide a fairer way to allocate costs than merely charging "per head." They give senior management clearer and tighter control of costs at their source and provide the metrics business unit managers need to reduce consumption.

Yet the GNS team realized that a system that could equitably assign costs across such a massive enterprise as Zurich's would have to be extremely robust and sophisticated enough to handle the complexities of their distributed network. With average loads of 7 million emails per month, over 500 GB of messaging traffic and 100 GB of replication traffic handled by the backbone monthly, the data volumes were clearly far too large for manual analysis. The cost allocation system would require an in-depth understanding of global messaging and replication behavior as well as sophisticated technology to extract and analyze huge volumes of data from server logs and directories.

Email costs include a fee based on the number of MBs of network traffic consumed by messages as they are routed to all of their recipients, not just on the number of emails sent out by a particular business unit. For example, a 1 MB message sent to 10 people all on the same server has less impact and, hence, carries a lower cost than a 1 MB message sent to hundreds of recipients on multiple servers. In a similar fashion, replication costs are allocated to each business unit based on MBs handled by the backbone, plus a flat charge for every database owner.

This usage-based cost-allocation method reflects DYS' deep understanding of the complexities of messaging and collaboration data propagation in large distributed enterprises - assuring the approach is accurate and calculated on actual resource consumption. The CONTROL! solutions were both scalable and robust enough to provide a cost allocation system that was tailored to Zurich's routing topology - yet flexible enough to deliver the same cost-reduction benefits to virtually any network topology.

The cost-allocation facility includes customized "billing statement" reports, and starting in November 2002, billing statements were sent to all business unit budgetary managers. As expected, aggregate charges for smaller business units are typically far less than those for larger business units; however, since charges are based on usage and not "per head," business units that send less mail will be charged less, regardless of their size. It can easily happen that a smaller business unit could be charged more than a much larger one depending on their message and replication traffic volumes. In fact, another aspect of the solution that is critical for its success is how quickly GNS can respond to questions from business unit managers about how they were charged. The GNS team simply turns to CONTROL! to run a report showing how the costs were incurred - down to the employee level if necessary.

The phones began ringing in the Group Network Services department when business unit managers received their first billing statements. However, they weren't calling to complain - rather they were calling to ask for specific ways they could reduce their costs, and GNS was able to assist them. This was just what management was hoping would happen.

Zurich's IT staff also uses Permessa Email CONTROL! to optimize email traffic flow to ensure continued high service levels. Using the flexible report design features of the product, they created various custom reports to evaluate delivery performance and proactively identify potential bottlenecks before they impact delivery times. Using Permessa Replication CONTROL!, Zurich's team keeps an accurate pulse on replication traffic. The solution provides daily analysis on replication activity and reports on which servers and databases are not replicating properly, so that action can be taken to avoid data integrity issues at the user level.

"DYS Analytics fully understands messaging and replication networks at an extremely detailed level, and CONTROL!'s flexibility was key in enabling us to create a system that fully met our needs," said Flavio Del Mestre, head of Zurich's GNS Services unit. "The solution is stable, it works in the background without interruption, and we can trust the figures it provides."

Del Mestre added: "Zurich has always been very cost-conscious while at the same time delivering superior service, and CONTROL! has helped us maintain our high standards. We've gotten the business units' attention on infrastructure usage and are providing them with fair and accurate charges based on actual resources they consume. Using CONTROL!, we are running messaging and collaboration like a business - to the benefit of everyone in the enterprise."

Run Messaging & Collaboration as a Business with Permessa Control! Data Sheet