FleetBoston building IT command center

The project will unify the bank's systems and centralize network management

June 16, 2003 (Computerworld)

ALBANY, N.Y. -- By November, FleetBoston Financial Corp. plans to complete a nearly $10 million project to build an enterprise operations center that will bring all its systems and network management operations into one room and provide real-time links to a secondary data center 150 miles away.
Robert Wischnowsky, FleetBoston's chief technology officer, said the new command center will centralize network support operations that have remained fractured following acquisitions by the Boston-based company. He added that he expects to be able to cut FleetBoston's IT staff by an unspecified number and increase the amount of floor space available at its primary data center here by 3,500 square feet -- two benefits that should produce a return on investment within a year.
FleetBoston has become one of the 10 largest banks in the U.S. by buying more than 150 firms during the past 20 years -- a growth strategy that Wischnowsky said will continue. But in an interview at the data center this month, he said merging systems became a standardized process, but the networks supporting FleetBoston's flagship banking business and its credit card services and capital leasing subsidiaries are currently separated from one another.
A Matter of Trust
"We've had firewalls in between [networks] because no one trusted each other," Wischnowsky said. FleetBoston plans to bring the nonbanking operations onto its consolidated network and "drive the standardization of processes across the company," he said.
For example, the company in April went live with IBM's Tivoli Business Systems Manager software after an 18-month rollout. Ed Glenning, who manages FleetBoston's enterprise systems, said the tool is being used by systems administrators to centrally monitor and control application and database servers, batch processing jobs, and mainframe CICS systems.
FleetBoston's systems, corporate networks and the network that supports its 3,400 ATMs are managed with different software tools by workers in separate locations -- the first two are in adjacent rooms at the Albany data center, and the ATM network is in another building in Albany.
But Glenning said that by November, he expects to consolidate all the systems and network management activities on Tivoli software and relocate the management operations to the new command center, which is being built within the Albany data center.
A Ridgefield Park, N.J., facility will be expanded as a backup data center and will share FleetBoston's data processing workload and act as a disaster recovery site. IT workers at both facilities will be able to operate every key system, from network servers and routers to management software, Glenning said.
Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said operations center consolidations are "monumental" tasks.
On the plus side, consolidation efforts cut down on potential points of failure and should produce efficiencies by introducing an enterprisewide monitoring and alert system, Litan said. "The goal is to walk into a control room and see one network," she added.