The technology will be used to improve the processes in three main areas: internal credit instructions, the Fortuneo online banking platform and an online trading platform.

Arkéa wanted to improve its technology infrastructure in order to support the fast paced transactions required in the financial sector, while maintaining a high quality of service and managing costs. Arkéa's IT department decided to roll out a large-scale project to meet these objectives while ensuring the business met the stringent CMMI and ISO 20000 standards which govern reviews and manufacturing respectively.

Until now Arkéa had been using an infrastructure supervision solution that worked by sending highly technical alerts to IT managers when an issue was detected anywhere within the IT environment. However, this approach meant while IT managers knew there was a problem; they could not see the real-time business impact on end users. As a result, teams were spending a lot of time trying to determine an alert's source and impact before even beginning to solve the issue, therefore lengthening incident resolution time.

In addition to the costs associated with these problems, they were also impacting Arkéa's operations. As a financial business, Arkea has strict service level agreement (SLA) objectives with both internal departments and external partners. Any breach of an SLA puts Arkéa at risk of having to pay a penalty.

"For us, the worst-case scenario is an end user calling the hotline to report a performance issue or to say that a business-critical application is unavailable, before the IT department is even aware of it. If an issue occurs in a trading application, for example, we risk possibly losing customers and significantly damaging our reputation," explained Didier Calvar, Deputy IT Director at Crédit Mutuel Arkéa.

"In the past, we adopted a reactive approach to managing our IT environment and controlling application availability. However, this view solely focused on infrastructure and wasn't sufficient in providing the functional view that we needed for swift problem resolution. After analysing various solutions we selected OpTier's CoreFirst because it is the only solution that enables us to get a detailed view of every transaction within our IT environment so that we can swiftly pinpoint and resolve potential issues and therefore improve the service we provide to our internal and external customers," said Calvar.

Arkéa selected CoreFirst from OpTier because the solution enables Arkéa to optimise its IT management and provides a real-time, end-to-end view of all business transactions, across all tiers of infrastructure. In addition, CoreFirst requires very little configuration - the solution adapts to changes in the applications and infrastructure simply.

Arkéa can now rapidly isolate issues within the IT infrastructure. This means that the company can solve problems before they impact business and reduce problem solving costs.

"In a highly competitive economic environment, IT is at the heart of every company's business and can have a direct impact on the company's productivity and turnover," stated Pascal Dallioux, Southern Europe Director at OpTier. "In the finance sector any application slowdown can have an immediate impact on earnings, which is why companies need a solution that drastically reduces business application unavailability. CoreFirst was specifically developed to address this issue by managing and supervising IT from a transaction-based viewpoint."