With a complex infrastructure and a growing business, demanding audits and multiple services to monitor, they needed a more efficient monitoring solution. Learn how they got proactive, increased availability and improved IT's credibility in only a couple of weeks

The ING Group is one of the world's leading financial corporations offering banking, insurance and asset management services to more than one million customers worldwide. Since 1978 ING Nationale-Nederlanden has been operating in Spain providing individuals and families with the best savings and investment solutions. ING Nationale-Nederlanden is represented in Spain through its network of offices and more than 2500 franchised insurance and investment agencies.

Common problems in daily operations
In 2007 Jordi Bueno Molpeceres, IT Systems Manager at ING Nationale-Nederlanden Spain faced a problem that many companies face today. Even though he had various monitoring tools, none of them was sufficiently heterogeneous, multiplatform, proactive or powerful to control ING's Business Services from a global perspective. They were isolated tools and did not offer the
“big picture”.

Critical applications deserve to be monitored
Many of the tools ING Nationale-Nederlanden used were low cost, open source (like Nagios) or internally developed, so none of them could ensure the quality of service ING was aiming for.

"The tools did not deal with the real IT department's needs. They were not oriented to business services monitoring but to isolated technical components", comments Jordi Bueno, "we needed agility, to find out about a problem before the end user did."

"With Tango/04, we have made a quantum leap in the quality of our business services."

The availability of services such as the CRM or web applications is crucial in any modern company, and ING Nationale-Nederlanden was no exception.

"An incident that affects the quality of our service has a high cost in lost business, worsens our image, reduces the productivity of our sales network or means delays in corporate reporting", Bueno explains.

The search for a powerful but easy-to-use solution
ING embarked on a search for a monitoring solution capable of really controlling and optimizing the company's business services and implementing new security controls.

During a period of two months, different alternatives were evaluated, including old monitoring frameworks like HP, CA or IBM. They even visited clients using these solutions to see them live in action.

Infrastructure, BSM, SLM and Security all in the same solution
So why did they choose Tango/04 over world-renowned brands? There were several reasons, according to Bueno: "Tango/04 is easy to use, has incredibly short deployment times, is more affordable and, at the end of the implementation project, the know-how stays here in ING."

This last factor is vital when selecting a monitoring solution. Older monitoring frameworks are so complex that it is hard to reach the level of confidence required to be autonomous, even after months of implementation and training. This is also a reason why most monitoring projects fail. With Tango/04 these are nonissues: "We are perfectly able to maintain and enhance the solution", says Bueno.

"It is easy to use it, has incredibly short deployment times, is more affordable and the know-how stays here in ING."

"Tango/04 met all our requirements and even adds a Service Level Management (SLM) module to manage SLAs for every monitored service. Plus, the solution comes with hundreds of built-in reports."

Service-Oriented Monitoring: A big jump in quality
And what were the results? "The implementation was very successful and it was done in the estimated time, without any problems whatsoever", says Bueno.

"We now have tremendous visibility of both our services and our infrastructure. We can now deal with any incident proactively. We can handle event and availability management like never before. We also have outstanding reporting for strategic capacity management, continual service improvement and forensic analysis."

"The implementation was very successful. It was done in the estimated time, without any problems whatsoever.”

"We have made a quantum leap in quality. We found a solution that permits high-value IT governance and lets us align ourselves with best-practices frameworks such as ITIL", concludes Bueno.

"Tango/04 is a solution of the highest standards, reliable and innovative, with great after-sales support services. I would like to give Tango/04 an A."