Wirral Metropolitan Borough saves £2.5million with Axway

LONDON, 23 March 2011 - Axway, the Business Interactions Networks Company, announced that Wirral, the Metropolitan Borough of Merseyside, has been using Axway’s Automator solution resulting in £2.5 million in savings over the last 10 years. Wirral began using Automator in 2000 selected from a tender to acquire a multi-platform scheduler has achieved return on investment (ROI) in the first year and operational profit every year since.

Axway Automator was chosen because it is a unique system that addresses Wirral’s need to integrate computing tasks across its Unix and Windows platforms, such as automated scheduling, data processing and the management of IT production. Due to the departmental procurement in the public sector, where each department is free to choose its own products and solutions, Wirral needed a system which was flexible enough to accommodate future needs. 

By using Automator’s monitoring and reporting functions, Wirral is able to automate system jobs, react to monitored data exchanges in real time, and apply processing based on time or events. Automator controls all the application jobs, batches, services and back-ups, and keeps everything running automatically. This allows Wirral to ensure application availability, provide service level monitoring and generate detailed performance reports on IT efficiency to senior council officials. One of the added benefits of this approach is that Wirral’s IT department no longer works 24/7 shifts and can  work  standard 9-5 days, saving costs for the council and giving IT staff more appealing work-patterns.

Jeff Ashworth, Head of Scheduling in Wirral Council’s finance department commented, “Once we realised how powerful Automator is, we immediately exploited everything it has to offer. We let the software run everything for us throughout the night, eliminating the need to pay costly shift allowances as well as the necessary insurance in place to cover the shifts. 

Axway Automator is a complete scheduling solution for automating real-time and near real-time batch processing in increasingly complex infrastructures. By intelligently and dynamically integrating events, dependencies, and schedules into business workloads across the enterprise, Automator can help companies reduce implementation costs and minimise impact on enterprise IT services through robust business automation.

Ashworth added, “Stability is a big issue for IT systems, especially if you rely on it to work through the night. With Automator, once you’ve tested it and it works, it works forever. I can’t remember the last time I needed to call tech support. We implemented the latest release of Automator last November, and the upgrade across all fourteen platforms was seamless. Thanks to the monitoring features we have put in place with Automator for each different server, accurate and detailed statistics are automatically generated. If someone comes to us and asks, ‘Why was the system down for ten minutes three months ago?’ we can tell them exactly what happened. We’ve got very accurate figures and can easily drill in to the detail  of the statistics.”

Denis Sennechael, Vice President, UK & EMEA, Sales & Operations at Axway said, “We have been working with Wirral for over ten years and it is always great to see a customer taking full advantage of our solutions to manage their business interactions. We are very proud that Automator has been such a profitable investment for the Borough and that we have been able to contribute to making the IT department’ more efficient.”

For more information about Axway Solution, please visit:
www.axway.com/products-solutions/ps-overview/axway-products-z/automator

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About the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral
Visit www.wirral.gov.uk

About Axway
Axway is the Business Interaction Networks company - the only provider in the market today to manage, run, secure, and monitor all of your business interactions, including email, files, messaging, services, events, and processes. Serving over 11,000 organizations in more than 100 countries, Axway facilitates the multi-enterprise transactions, processes and integration that accelerate business by eliminating the barriers between vendors, customers, departments, partners and suppliers. Axway's comprehensive offerings include business-to-business integration, managed file transfer, secure email, business activity monitoring, enterprise application integration, service-oriented architecture, business process management, track & trace and identity validation solutions. Axway provides professional and managed services, as well as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, Axway's global presence spans 20 countries.