HDFC Life's IT Challenge :

Typical of a player in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, HDFC Life has a diverse IT environment. From the IBM mainframe that serves as the core system to the MQs used for connectivity,the technologies, platforms, and applications that are business-critical to HDFC Life span a broad spectrum. Although they are not a true 24/7 operation, HDFC Life's website and applications are to be made available for use virtually round-the-clock for its global clientele. For example, a customer could be making a payment at any time using their website. "A few applications are verycritical to HDFC Life,Ó says Rudresh Bhatt, senior IT manager at HDFC Life. They bring in new business for us to the extent that, if they are down for even 15 minutes, we have a huge financial loss." For instance, its point of sale application is used by nine to ten thousand agents everyday across India and is the main source of business for HDFC Life. The business practices at HDFC Life were undergoing a steady transition towards a 24/7 operations model, and a similar evolution was reflected in its IT systems as well, from classic active server pages (ASP) to service oriented architecture (SOA) to business process management system (BPMS). "[Managing] this diversity was becoming a problem,Ó says Rudresh. I was only able to concentrate on [monitoring of] a basic set of applications".

The in-house IT team set about developing small, custom applications that could monitor its systems, and alert them of failures. "What happened then was, managing the failures of these alerts became [another,bigger] problem," recounts Rudresh. The troubles didn't end there however. To get a report about a down-time incident "with these small, customized tools [that were developed in-house], I had to go through all the mails!" he recalls, a man - hour overhead the IT team just could not afford. What HDFC Life needed was an APM solution that could function as a centralized monitoring repository, which could also generate reports instantly