HP (NYSE: HPQ) has announced that Sesame, Britain's largest provider of support to Independent Financial Advisors (IFAs), has selected HP to ensure that its systems can cope with large scale growth in demand. HP is also working with its partner, Kavanagh, to put in place a new infrastructure that will allow Sesame to develop its own specialised applications.
Sesame brings together the five IFA networks that used to be part of Misys IFA Services Limited. It currently provides over 7,000 IFAs throughout the UK with support services, enabling them to ensure compliance with strict financial regulations and deliver a variety of products and services to their clients and the general public.
In 2001, HM Treasury announced that the powers of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) would be extended to include the regulation of mortgage lending, sales and administration and general insurance sales and administration. Companies which are not authorised by the FSA in time for the deadlines set, Oct 31st 2004 and 14th January 2005 respectively, will be committing a criminal offence if they continue any activity in these areas after those dates. This legal requirement for compliance has greatly driven demand for Sesame's services.
In order to cope with this huge growth in demand Sesame wanted to ensure that it had an extremely robust, reliable and above all manageable infrastructure. HP helped Sesame to upgrade to Systems Insight Manager v4.1 on over 100 HP ProLiant servers earlier this year and then supplied the necessary products needed to upgrade the infrastructure to a blade-based solution, for which with its partner Kavanagh provided consultancy services.
Nathan Young, Infrastructure Architect, Sesame, says "We are working to provide services that enable IFAs to track their activities and monitor their commissions via the web. Most importantly, Sesame ensures that they are compliant with all FSA regulations. In order to do that with the volumes expected, we really needed to up the ante on our web capability. With HP we have done just that as well as optimising the manageability of the system."
Phil McLean, ISS Product Manager, HP UK & I,.said, "With Mortgage Day fast approaching and thousands of IFAs relying on Sesame, it needed to ensure that its systems would be able to cope with the extra demand. HP, together with Kavanagh, was able to meet the tight time constraints whilst still giving the best total cost of ownership, enabling Sesame to achieve what it set out to do."