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CITIGROUP

• Project leads: Executives with Citibank Technology Infrastructure
• Technology focus: Management - configuration and change management

In a $1.5 million project, Citigroup wanted to find a product that could provide all the reporting, governance, inventory and configuration functions, such as rollout and rollback, that it had been doing manually, while instituting workflow and process best practices. Citigroup selected AlterPoint's DeviceAuthority change and configuration management software, and is already reporting benefits. For example, it has reduced the time required to manage access lists across devices from about five staff members working three days to one working fewer than seven hours. It also nearly eliminated manual remediation. The New York global giant has 44,000 network devices, in support of 300,000 employees. Full details

FARM CREDIT SERVICES OF AMERICA

• Project lead: Beth Schmidt, director, application development
• Technology focus: Applications - CRM integration

Farm Credit Services of America, a provider of credit services for farmers in Omaha, Neb., undertook a $1.3 million project to build a Microsoft .Net Framework-based application that creates a single integration point for four customer-related systems. The application, called Pinwheel, has increased employee productivity by 70%. The firm uses Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2004 Enterprise Edition to manage and exchange data among the systems. Previously, such updates meant running lengthy batch processes nightly.

FIDELITY INVESTMENTS

• Project lead: Joe McKenna, vice president of architecture and engineering
• Technology focus: Management - business services management

Fidelity Investment's critical IT infrastructure includes more than 150 F5 Networks load-balancers managing more than 35,000 endpoints, which produce more than 45 million daily page loads. Fidelity's Integrated Monitoring Center (IMC) carries the burden of keeping this online environment, for trading and other applications, running smoothly 24/7. IMC recently implemented a business service management (BSM) strategy via Managed Objects' End-to-End Service Manager. This BSM tool consolidates and correlates network and systems management information into a single, real-time centralized view, enabling the IMC to mitigate problems quickly. With the tool, the IMC can direct the load balancers to divert traffic around trouble spots. This can take as few as five seconds vs. the 60 minutes of old. Benefits to the Boston firm include increased productivity and improved customer satisfaction.