In the high-stakes game of investment banking, technology is often the differentiator between winning and losing. With this in mind, one of the top five investment banks in the world created the “innovation center” designed to enable the internal testing of emerging technologies. 

The innovation center is a 13,000+ sf data center space that consists of 70 unique environments, tens of thousands of devices, and an inventory of well over 5,000 parts such as NIC cards, GPUs, and solid-state drives. Tracking the movement of this vast amount of equipment as well as the many requests to install and evaluate new technology is an immense challenge.

The team that maintains the center must have complete visibility into the location of all devices and parts and who is using them at all times. They need to monitor usage, recover assets when projects end, ensure that hardware is disposed of securely, and maintain up-to-date audit trails. Failure to track and record the history of these assets can result in security breaches and millions of dollars in fines.

Employees who want to check out equipment need visibility into the center’s inventory and assurance that the information is up to date. They also need to request the equipment without speaking with an innovation team member.

The team was managing the inventory and equipment requests with manual processes and a mountain of spreadsheets. There was no easy way to keep track of changes and who made them. Additionally, the team needed to be onsite to handle requests for equipment. They needed a more agile and compliance-driven solution for managing the center’s asset management program.

In evaluating solutions, the bank felt it was critical to partner with a technology provider that could deliver agile customization and rapid support. The bank evaluated several asset management and ITSM solutions but felt none could handle an environment as dynamic as the innovation center. Ultimately, they turned to ReadyWorks, an emerging technology known as a Digital Platform Conductor (DPC).

ReadyWorks reduces the risk and cost of complex IT infrastructure programs.

ReadyWorks:

1. Collects, cleans, and normalizes critical program data from all IT and business systems to provide an accurate, real-time view of the entire IT estate and interdependencies.
2. Uses this data to analyze risk and automate planning.
3. Conducts workflow execution for both systems and people.
4. Assesses risk and reports on program status.

ReadyWorks was chosen because of the platform’s flexibility and its ability to render relationships between assets from any point of view – environment, server, user, or part. Using ReadyWorks, the team is able to automate the entire asset lifecycle management process. They can now connect project information with asset information, giving them a real-time, 360° view of all assets and complete details about which equipment is being used by which team for which project. This resulted in significant improvements in asset tracking efficiency, saving the firm $500k annually. In addition, by leveraging ReadyWorks, the innovation center has avoided millions of dollars in fines by maintaining audit compliance.