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AIC, Ltd. (AIC) is Canada’s largest privately held mutual fund company. Since its founding in 1985, the company has grown to manage approximately $10 billion in assets and features a growing portfolio of mutual funds, segregated funds and corporate class funds.
From an IT perspective, AIC needed to bring in more and more hardware to support the increasing number of transactions that the firm was handling as it expanded. This led to an ever-increasing data center footprint, as well as the associated costs: power, cooling and maintenance, to name a few areas.
With the VMware Infrastructure 3 suite, AIC has been able to handily address its IT challenges and create a scalable, manageable IT infrastructure. “With lots of technologies, you have to wait two or three years after you’ve implemented it before you really see an ROI,” says Sam Stravato, CTO at AIC. “That’s not the case with VMware technology.
We were able to see savings right off the bat, by shrinking our data center footprint from 175 boxes down to four boxes. And more importantly, it makes us better suited to future growth: we can scale easily and create virtual machines as needed, in a matter of minutes.”
Results
- Save $400,000 per year. “If we had stayed with a physical server environment instead of a virtual environment, the costs would easily run $400,000 per year—factoring in the hardware, the maintenance costs and the salaries for three additional full-time employees,” says Stravato.
- Reduce administrative work by 70 percent. “I’d rather have my employees spend their time on innovation than on procuring and configuring servers,” says Stravato. “Using VMware software to create virtual machines on the fly has reduced that type of administrative work by 70 percent, freeing up my employees to concentrate on more value-driven areas.”
- Double IT productivity without increasing headcount. “We have less IT employees than we did five years ago, and yet we’re managing twice as many applications,” says Stravato. “That’s thanks to VMware technology.”
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