Case Study: HSBC                                     

Synopsis

Like many financial institutions, HSBC discovered that an enormous amount of resource was being utilised to effectively maintain and support existing IT assets. To negate the unnecessary cost of this ineffective utilisation, HSBC chose to examine their IT environment in an attempt to re-deploy resources towards meeting the demand for new developments whilst establishing a core support team to manage their existing developments. HSBC chose the Micro Focus APM solution to provide them with a comprehensive view of their application portfolio, which has enabled them to identify and subsequently rewrite or redesign resource-heavy applications, leading to a projected cost saving of 10% per annum. 

Business benefit

HSBC are experiencing an impressive array of business benefits since adopting the Micro Focus APM solution. These include;

• Clear view of IT resources – Micro Focus automatically profiles the full application portfolio and provides business and technical dashboards for the CIO, project managers and software engineers.
• Focus on productivity – By enabling any IT application to be maintained, changed and supported in any of their global IT centres, HSBC were able to quickly implement the process of improving staff application knowledge. This reduced the time taken for their core technology support team to take on a maintenance project from months down to weeks and subsequently the time taken for new developments has been reduced from years to months.
• Quality maintenance – The solution package has also been used by HSBC to monitor the quality of the output of each application so that technicians can track the progress of changes whilst ensuring that any bugs are efficiently dealt with. Additionally, in more than one instance the APM solution has been used to quickly identify and resolve system incidents, significantly reducing the time to resolution.
• Circulation of knowledge – The Micro Focus APM solution reduces dependence upon subject matter experts by facilitating standardised access to each application’s technical and practical structure which enables technicians to quickly understand how the application interfaces with the rest of the portfolio.
• Supporting decision-making – Micro Focus ensure that relevant information is readily available at each tier of the decision making process.
• Multi-platform capability – As well as working across the lifecycle of maintenance, the ability of Micro Focus to implement this solution on any platform has helped HSBC continually examine their IT assets both horizontally and vertically. This allows for a depth of knowledge that has been critical in helping HSBC determine the value, cost and quality of their application portfolio.