Swiss Re Case Study
Swiss Re Centralizes Job Scheduling with Stonebranch's Independent Scheduling Agents Solution
A global reinsurer saves time and money by centralizing Job Scheduling with Opswise Universal Agent
Challenge
Swiss Re, one of the world's leading reinsurers, had too many independently-operated
organizational units, and needed to integrate their job scheduling platforms. According to
Christoph Toneatti, Head of Systems Automation at Swiss Re, their current job scheduling systems were causing "interfacing problems, redundant data, complexity and a lack of accountability that we were no longer willing to accept." Initially, Swiss Re tried to correct the problem by using the cross-platform component of their existing mainframe scheduler. This, however, became incredibly complex and unreliable, and did not allow for centralized job scheduling.
Solution
Swiss Re realized that their legacy solution would not help them achieve their goals and elected to upgrade their job scheduling environment using Indesca™. Indesca, Stonebranch's Independent Scheduling Agents solution, enabled Swiss Re's scheduling infrastructure to become compatible and available across the entire computing
environment. Toneatti said, "We only had to install a small, efficient agent on each server, and we didn't have to make any changes to the proven and reliable processes which Swiss Re had been running for years."
Results
Indesca's solution proved useful in many ways. Swiss Re found that they had better service delivery at a lower cost and without additional staff, saving time, money and resources.
Indesca lowers cost by reducing the software needed in order to maintain automated processes. This allows Swiss Re to extend the centrally managed automation tools to distributed systems without adding additional costs.
- Centralization of Swiss Re's scheduling agents
- Integration between independent organizational units
- Cost savings based on decreased need for personnel
- Unprecedented growth of automated processes
- Increase of 688% in batches handled
Six months after Swiss Re implemented Indesca, they were managing 60,000 batch processes per month on more than 200 servers. Today, Swiss Re finds that Indesca helps to properly manage more than 410,000 batch processes per month on more than 1,700 servers. Indesca has seamlessly helped create this 688% increase in batch processing and will continue to scale for Swiss Re's future growth. Hansjorg Knittel, Head of Systems Management at Swiss Re, adds, "Thanks to Indesca, we were able to increase stability of the distributed environment. All platforms can now be audited, and we were able to handle the enormous growth of the distributed environment without increasing personnel."
About Swiss Re
Founded in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1863, Swiss Re operates in more than 30 countries and provides its expertise and services to clients throughout the world. Swiss Re's traditional reinsurance products and related services for property and casualty as well as for life and health business are complemented by insurance-based corporate finance
solutions and supplementary services for comprehensive risk management. Swiss Re
is classified as "A+" by Standard and Poor, by Moodys with "A1" and A.M. Best with "A". For more information visit: www.swissre.com.
