Evolven provides a complete overview of everything happening on the various servers, and constantly analyzes this. This drastically improves insight into the infrastructure. The interface clearly shows the main problems, enabling us to anticipate them and prevent incidents.
Jeroen de Vries, Team Leader in Development Support at Argenta
CHALLENGE: VISIBILITY. CONSISTENCY. CONFIGURATION.
For years, Argenta Spaarbank has been the honest, sober, safe and people-oriented bank of choice for Belgian and Dutch families. To remain competitive and optimize service to customers, Argenta continually invests in improving its applications.
Needle in a Haystack.
Argenta’s server farm and test environments are managed by an external partner, Cegeka. Until recently, Argenta had too little oversight of configuration modifications to its server farm, or any incidents these might cause within the environments and the releases. This led to delays in the testing and release of applications.
Jeroen de Vries, Team Leader in Development Support, is responsible at Argenta for the test environments of the applications. In the Transition/Innovation (TRAIN) programme, his task, together with his team, is to increase the frequency of application releases and to improve the quality of the releases.
Manually searching for errors cost the Development Support Team many man/hours. Moreover, the release frequency had to be raised due increasing demand from the business. The consequences were even more incidents, making for a more pressing need for an efficient solution.
EVOLVEN CHANGE-CENTRIC ANALYTICS SOLUTION.
Argenta arrived at Evolven’s IT Operations Analytics solution, with Ymor as its regular implementation partner. Evolven matched the bank’s needs precisely.
“Argenta’s IT environment is highly complex and sensitive to incidents. Evolven provides a complete overview of everything happening on the various servers, and constantly analyzes this. The software also makes forecasts based on the ‘machine learning’ functionality. This drastically improves insight into the infrastructure. The interface clearly shows the main problems, enabling us to anticipate them and prevent incidents,” said Jeroen de Vries.
Evolven allows Argenta to:
- Easily compare servers and business service environments to identify and report inconsistencies and critical differences.
- Intelligently analyze inconsistencies to highlight those that can create significant issues.
- Quickly focus on the most relevant and critical changes.
- Drill-down to zoom-in on high risk changes.
Knowledge and Experience.
Ymor took on responsibility for the implementation and training. Jeroen: “Ymor’s wealth of experience and practical knowledge guaranteed good, safe implementation in line with Argenta’s strict standards. In consultation with Ymor, we opted for phased implementation. Thanks to their adequate service provision and consistent pro-active thinking with Argenta, this complex project went very smoothly.”
RESULTS: LESS DOWNTIME.
MORE APPLICATION RELEASES.
After the implementation of Evolven, the downtime of test environments was considerably reduced. “While an initial installation in a test environment used to take four to eight days, this now takes only one or two days. It’s a gigantic step forward”, says Jeroen. The problems arising after application releases have even been reduced during weekends. Jeroen adds: “We release on Saturday night and test the application on Sunday. Thanks to Evolven, we gain several hours on Sunday, which reduces our workload and saves man/hours.” Moreover, Argenta can now make eight releases per year, while we previously made three.
Simple Administration.
Jeroen is also very pleased with the administration: “The people who used to do all the checks manually now perform the administration of Evolven. The system is so intuitive that no extra training is required to allow technical personnel to work with the tool. They can now perhaps resolve twenty times as many problems as before. While an initial installation in a test environment used to take four to eight days, this now takes only one or two days. It’s a gigantic step forward.”
About Argenta
Argenta Bank- en Verzekeringsgroep (Argenta Group) provides retail financial services for families in Belgium and the Netherlands, through Argenta Spaarbank (banking) and Argenta Assuranties (insurance). Founded in 1956, Argenta is today Belgian’s fifth largest banking institution by customer deposits, with 1.65 million customers. Its product offering, focused on simplicity and long-term relationships of trust with its family clients, is built on four pillars: savings, lending, insurance and investments. The group operates in Belgium through an extensive network of local self-employed tied agents. Visit http://www.argenta.eu/.