Challenge

Reale Mutua Group operates 700 agencies across Italy, providing products like life and car insurance, pension funds and savings programs. To serve thousands of clients every day, Reale Mutua must ensure each agency has reliable, round-the-clock access to applications it needs.

Antonio Motta, IT operations manager at Reale Mutua, said, “The mission of our IT department is to make sure that the technical backbone in support of business services is constantly up and running and, in case of issues, that we take the right action straight away. Because we lacked a real-time view of the health of our systems, our agencies would inform the central business of system failures before we in the IT department were even aware of them. This generated complaints and delays in resolutions. We needed to improve our support to the agencies and, ultimately, increase their satisfaction.”

At that time, core business services at Reale Mutua were monitored through separate con - soles, each one specifically configured to report on one component, without any centralization. The inability to aggregate this data made it difficult for the IT department to give the business a unified, real-time and accurate view of service health.

Solution

Aiming to deploy a centralized service-management platform, Reale Mutua approached Partner Hogwart for initial consulting. Hogwart supported Reale Mutua in creating the service catalog and in redesigning the configuration management database to create a clear, complete list of all the business services delivered and the underlying IT dependencies.

Reale Mutua considered multiple vendors, and decided Operations Center was the best platform to report on and communicate seamlessly with all the different systems.

Gianni Fantino, Service Level Manager at Reale Mutua, said, “Operations Center appeared to be the most complete and versatile product. Working with Hogwart was a guarantee of success, as its team combined unmatched expertise in service management with excellent knowledge of the Micro Focus solution.”

Operations Center allows Reale Mutua to map the IT infrastructure of all its agencies to the architecture of business services, enabling both technical and business managers to understand the connections between them.

“The product enabled us to create several dashboards, the most important of which is designed for our general management,” said Fantino. “This dashboard represents five main areas of information: core applications, noncore applications, helpdesk, a map of all our agencies and current alerts. We aggregate all the data gathered from our separate monitoring systems into this view to provide an up-todate, trustworthy view of the overall health of our business management systems.”

Results

Reale Mutua now benefits from a comprehensive, real-time understanding of the dependencies between business services and the underlying IT systems and processes.

“By implementing the Micro Focus solution, the credibility of our IT staff has dramatically improved: all of Reale Mutua’s business areas now have full peace of mind that, in the unlikely event of a system failure, we will immediately understand the business impact and move quickly to resolve any disruption to ongoing services,” said Fantino.

With intuitive and accurate real-time views of the status of operations in all its agencies, Reale Mutua has greater control over service management and can ensure smoother performance for all business-critical processes.

“We are just one year into the implementation but have already noticed that the number of duplicate alerts and errors has fallen quite significantly: from 51 to 39,” said Motta. “This implies that we have saved considerable amounts of time and effort in performing fixes and maintenance.”

He concluded, “We plan to leverage the great versatility of the Micro Focus platform to start introducing more business-oriented data into our systems, such as information on life and car insurance. We are also very confident that Micro Focus Operations Center will enable us to meet the upcoming service level agreements that we are currently negotiating with our agencies.”