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Customer Snapshot
Company: LGT Group
Business: Financial Services
Corporate Headquarters: Vaduz, Liechtenstein
Webpage: www.lgt.com
Owned and managed by the Princely House of Liechtenstein for over 70 years, the LGT Group is a wealth and asset management group serving private clients and institutional investors. The bank offers high-net-worth private clients wealth management services tailored to meet their needs, from building up and maintaining assets to passing them on to their successors. For private and institutional investors, the LGT Group asset management specialists aim to identify the most promising investment opportunities the world over.
For many years, LGT relied upon a suite of homegrown banking applications written in NATURAL running on IBM mainframe servers to support their back-office business operations, but as their core banking applications were nearing the end of their lifecycle, LGT senior management faced a “build or buy” choice if they were going to modernize their IT systems and provide users with new functionality that leveraged new technological innovations.
Business Challenge
LGT decided to migrate from their homegrown application to the Avaloq banking system. In addition to offering an integrated banking solution, Avaloq would allow LGT to minimize maintenance overheads with regular software refreshes that would support the bank in remaining compliant with regulations across different countries in which it operates. LGT identified the need for an enterprise job scheduler that could automate Avaloq internal processing and enable integration with its 20+ external applications.
“We had time pressures and so there was a very short evaluation period. We developed a set of requirements and a weighted scorecard to assess the different products,” said René Maag, IT Production Planner, LGT Group. “While we judged each scheduler on individual features such as support for dependencies, calendaring, completion code and error handling, we were also keen to look how each product was architected.
“The products we evaluated offered either centralized or de-centralized management of jobs. Decentralized appealed to us because it would help us when we running jobs across a WAN, that spans international borders. On the other hand centralized would give us an overview of how all systems are doing through a single view. We opted for a centralized approach with the UC4 platform. It gave us enterprise visibility at minimum support effort. As it turns out, UC4 could also be used as a de-centralized scheduler.”
UC4 Solution
LGT will operate 5 production Avaloq instances, on behalf of business operations in Liechtenstein, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong. Implementing UC4, LGT was able to centralize job definitions for its global operations to a single source. In addition to reducing maintenance overheads, business users were able to take ownership of when jobs ran and control input parameter settings for their jobs.
The UC4 platform submits and monitors Avaloq jobs using a certified adapter allowing LGT to automate period-end procedures and other high volume processing demands. Using an enterprise scheduler to manage Avaloq and external application workload provides the bank with visibility across all of its business processes. Being able to alter the system date means scheduling procedures for different time zones can be tested. With UC4 it is easy to set up a job once and repeated execution. Critical tasks, such as file transfers, can be double-checked to ensure they complete properly. Error recovery/restart procedures will automatically take corrective actions when jobs fail or terminate with non-zero completion codes.
“The Avaloq internal scheduler gives you a view over all of your jobs but each job comprises a few or many tasks and you can’t get down to task level. This makes it very difficult to track progress" said René Maag. “With UC4 we have much tighter control over our Avaloq workload 24x7 all year around. We can run jobs in parallel and reduce elapsed times. We are able to start jobs from their point of failure. We can integrate Avaloq processing with our other applications.”
In addition to managing workload across all Avaloq instances and other applications, UC4 is also being used to automate database cloning, backups and housekeeping tasks. At LGT, there are quite a few instances when calculations consume significant computing resource, e.g. pillar calculations, resulting in spikes in processing demands. With UC4 dynamically controlling the distribution of this workload, these spikes can be smoothed down reducing the impact on service to other applications and end users.
LGT Group Benefits
The UC4 platform provides LGT Group with the visibility and control of IT workload generated by Avaloq and its external applications. Integrated version management and control of job definitions combined with auditing of all changes and processing activities, mitigates IT risk and ensures accountability for LGT. While encryption of all UC4 communications enhances security, the ability to edit code-page tables offers the bank increased flexibility when transferring files internationally.
“There is no way we could do what we need to do without using a sophisticated scheduler. UC4 provides us with centralized process management and an overview of all systems at a single glance,” said René Maag. “All the expectations we had set have been met with the UC4 platform. The product has been very flexible and features as part of the future plans to automate the whole IT infrastructure at LGT.”
At a Glance
Business Challenge
- Automate scheduling of Avaloq banking system jobs
- Manage workload across global WAN environment
- Integrate Avaloq with external applications processing
- Centralize control and monitoring of all systems
UC4 Solution
- Multi-platform enterprise scheduler
- Certified Avaloq adapter
- Dynamic workload management
- Parameter substitution and flexible scripting
- Comprehensive audit and reporting
LGT Group Benefits
- End-to-end process management and visibility
- Centralized control and decentralized processing
- Increased throughput for Avaloq jobs
- Fewer errors and reduced recovery times
- Lower maintenance and admin overheads
- Improved utilization of computing resources
“There is no way we could do what we need to do without using a sophisticated scheduler. UC4 provides us with centralized process management and an overview of all systems at a single glance.”
René Maag, IT Production Planner
LGT Group, Liechtenstein
