 "Fullerton Securites & Wealth Advisors Ltd. - An IBM Case Study")
Fullerton Securities & Wealth Advisors is a start-up organization which is a fully-owned subsidiary of Fullerton Financial holdings, Singapore. The company offers world-class financial planning and a wide range of wealth management products to mass affluent and affluent customer segments.
As a start-up wealth management company, Fullerton Securities needed to leverage a highly responsive infrastructure to cater to its multi-location business environment. The new infrastructure thus needed to be based on a reliable, redundant and scalable architecture. In order for the business to succeed in the near future, it needed to be able to steadily increase the amount of information and information processing power on the desks of traders and brokers.
As the company grew, it would also need to increase the amount of integration between its critical systems, as well as with other parts of the enterprise’s IT network. Thus, Fullerton Securities began looking for a customized, flexible IT framework that could scale up to accommodate an increasing number of business transactions.
To achieve its goals, Fullerton Securities tapped IBM Global Technology Services – Integrated Technology Services and IBM Business Partner TEAM Computers to design and implement a solution. The IBM team recommended that the company build its infrastructure from the ground up with scalable IBM BladeCenter technology. Convinced by the solution’s ease-of-administration, small footprint, and performance, Fullerton Securities asked the IBM team to implement one IBM BladeCenter H Chassis at all three of the company’s data centers in Bangalore, Gurgaon and Mumbai. In each Chassis, Global Technology Services installed a combination of 31 IBM BladeCenter HS21 and IBM BladeCenter JS21 blade servers running the Windows operating system. The new IBM BladeCenter environment runs the majority of the company’s core applications, while previously existing IBM System x servers from the parent company support the company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
To ensure business continuity management standards, IBM Global Technology Services also implemented IBM Tivoli Storage V5.5 software, which enables the company to manage the data backups of all three geographically disparate data centers from a single location. Highly flexible, Tivoli Storage Manager works cohesively with the company’s Windows, AIX and Intel environments to provide reliable, automated data backup. The entire engagement was completed in 3 months, prior to the launch of Fullerton Securities’ business.
By working closely with IBM, Fullerton Securities was able to leverage a powerful, scalable infrastructure that met its business needs. Furthermore, the new solution was delivered on schedule, ensuring a timely launch of the company’s mission-critical applications. Fullerton Securities is impressed with the small footprint of the IBM BladeCenter solution, which has thus far enabled it to house 31 blade servers in a single chassis and is capable of scaling higher as the business grows.
Furthermore, because the BladeCenter is renowned for its low energy consumption, the company is anticipating a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Finally, with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager in place, Fullerton Securities was in compliance with a number of financial industry regulations for business continuity by the time it launched its business. Overall, the company was incredibly impressed with the services delivered by IBM India, and even commended the efforts of the team with a letter of appreciation.