Availability and More: End-to-End Monitoring Helps IT Add Value From the Business User's Point of View

About three years ago, a leading U.S. bank with global operations decided to transform the way it managed the availability of its IT infrastructure. Today, it's preparing to leverage that initiative in innovative ways to deliver new kinds of business value. The bank's challenge was a familiar one to many corporations. Its IT environment, which evolved in part through corporate mergers and acquisitions, was both large and heterogeneous. Comprising mainframes and about 15,000 distributed servers, the bank's infrastructure spans three major data centers and 14 regional server installations in North America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Africa. The systems run a broad mix of software, including enterprise business applications, such as Oracle PeopleSoft; major industry applications, such as securities trading software; middleware; and desktop applications.