Realizing its existing processes and tools were inadequate, labor intensive and error-prone,
Morgan Stanley began looking for a new application deployment solution in early 2007. While not
required in the initial assessment, Morgan Stanley also hoped to find a tool that would also
provide capabilities such as hardware and operating system provisioning.
customer success story
Morgan Stanley
Complex Deployment Done Right at Morgan Stanley
Geography The clients served by Morgan Stanley's Global Wealth Management Group and North America the firm's internal Financial Advisors need the very latest information about market changes, the execution of trades and informed analysis to make the best Industry investment decisions.Finance Having the latest information means having the latest versions of business applications, and this is Business Need where BMC BladeLogic helps Morgan Stanley assure consistent, high-quality change management Deploy application changes more efficiently across multiple environments without interrupting the business or tying up expensive support staff.and consistently across hundreds of servers in Morgan Stanley turned to BMC BladeLogic "to achieve rapid installation and reduce lead times two data centers without sacrificing application for application deployments and to assure consistency among hundreds of application servers", up-time, security or regulatory compliance. says Michael Cantwell, a vice president of Morgan Stanley's Field Application and Data Services group. BMC BladeLogic met those goals, allowing his group to improve change management Solution capacity more than tenfold during a weekly two-hour change window, reduce downtime, and BMC BladeLogic Configuration Manager, improve labor efficiency by $270,000 in its first year. including the Operations Manager and Application Release Manager components. DEPLOYMENT NEEDS Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm with more than $782 billion in assets under Results management, and more than 600 offices in 33 countries. Its Global Wealth Management Group (GWMG) provides brokerage, investment and financial services to individual investors with > Increased change management capacity products including mutual funds, equities, fixed income products, banking, mortgages, insurance tenfold with BMC BladeLogic and annuities.> Improved execution quality GWMG heavily relies on two Web portals, each of which consist of roughly 80 to 90 servers > Reduced change-related downtime running over 100 applications. One portal (Ideas) is accessed by Morgan Stanley's financial > Estimated saving of at least $270,000 advisors to perform functions such as reviewing client account data, statements and rebalancing annually through improved labor efficiency portfolios. The external (ClientServ) portal allows Morgan Stanley clients to view account summaries, review gains and losses in their accounts, trade securities, review account activity, download tax information and perform banking transactions.
Morgan Stanley is constantly adding capabilities, data sources, interface features, enhancing security or applying software patches to the applications running within both portals. "These environments have a very high change velocity," says Cantwell. "We're deploying as many as one hundred changes per week."
These changes must be applied across numerous servers in development, QA (quality assurance)/staging, production and business continuity planning (BCP) environments in Morgan Stanley's main Brooklyn data center and its standby data center in Utah.
"We maintain a very rigorous change management processes. Our controls are under constant scrutiny from internal auditors, our compliance and legal departments, and through them, from regulators" says Cantwell. In order to meet these requirements, the firm must assure that each change is not only deployed properly, but can be audited and rolled back if needed.
What's more, most changes must be performed within a brief weekly two-hour window to prevent any interruption in business, and to minimize the time that as many as 25 staffers must be on hand to coordinate the changes.
Realizing its existing processes and tools were inadequate, labor intensive and error-prone, Morgan Stanley began looking for a new application deployment solution in early 2007. While not required in the initial assessment, Morgan Stanley also hoped to find a tool that would also provide capabilities such as hardware and operating system provisioning."BMC BladeLogic has become our core deployment engine. We like the native GUI for ad-hoc queries, auditing and performing MULTIPLE CHOICESCantwell's group considered building a solution in-house as well as buying packaged software change simulations but the open architecture fro... [download for more]
