ACADEMIA

IBM announced that the largest insurance company in the Czech Republic, Česká pojišťovna a.s, relies on IBM smarter computing to help prevent IT issues before they occur and to support its core business functions, such as claims processing and customer management.

The IBM technology has led to the reduction of annual IT maintenance costs by US$500,000, while allowing the insurance company to provide better online reporting for business users and the best experience for its clients.  

Since the reintroduction of the competitive marketplace in the Czech Republic in 1991, Česká pojišťovna has grown into the largest insurance provider in the country with 3,900 employees, 5,600 agents and more than 4,500 business locations. That growth, however, led to system sprawl, the creation of independent and disparate IT operations, and a lack of integration. As a result, costs and the risk of system failures were rising.  

To deal with this situation, Česká pojišt’ovna worked with IBM Premier Business Partner GC System, a.s. to add a suite of IBM software and systems to better manage its IT infrastructure, including monitoring, event assessment and predictive analysis.  

Now performance data is collected and streamed through a central console that provides a consolidated view of information across the IT environment, where it is monitored and reported on in real-time. Historical and predictive analysis tools alert the IT department to potential fluctuations in resource use and performance issues. This allows administrators to rebalance workloads or fix other root causes to avoid problems before they affect the business. By embedding predictive analytics into the infrastructure, Česká pojišťovna can respond more quickly and accurately to customer needs, better anticipate and prevent outages, and deliver fact-driven metrics.  

“This IT service management deployment is one of the largest and most modern of its kind within Europe’s insurance market,” said Miroslav Lhotský of Česká pojišt’ovna’s Competence Center. “Through the IBM solution and its preventive approach to IT, we can better ensure that everything from contracts to SLA assessment runs reliably, minimizing impact on productivity.” 

Among the IBM Tivoli software being used, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager plays a critical role in capturing and correlating service events from multiple sources in a central database running on two IBM Power 550 Express servers. 

“When it comes to the daily operations of a large insurance provider, any risk of IT downtime is unacceptable,” said Pavel Šiška, sales manager, Sectors, IBM Czech Republic. “Having an IT infrastructure that is integrated and intelligent allows Česká pojišťovna to keep its focus on serving the needs of its customers."