American Life Insurance Company Enhances IT Operations with Assure iOptimize for Global Efficiency

American Life Insurance Company (ALICO), a MetLife company, is one of the largest international financial service companies in the world. Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, USA, ALICO conducts business in more than 55 countries and regions, including Western, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Japan, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The company provides a wide range of wealth management, retirement planning, life, and health insurance solutions to millions of individuals and corporate customers. As a large corporate entity, ALICO's operations are extensive and complex, requiring robust IT infrastructure to support its global business activities. The Wilmington office serves as the IT development hub for all of ALICO’s production offices worldwide, handling tasks such as coding, application enhancement, issue resolution, and disk storage management. This central IT department plays a crucial role in ensuring the smooth operation of ALICO's diverse and widespread offices, making it essential for them to have efficient systems in place to manage their IT resources effectively.

In the past, ALICO ran repeated queries to determine resource usage on its IBM i systems. Each time, the query parameters would be changed to get the precise information that the IT department needed. This work was time-consuming, cumbersome and repetitive. To overcome this burden, the company wanted software designed specifically to monitor the health of its systems. Furthermore, it was difficult for ALICO’s central IT department to scrutinize the contents of the disks used by the company’s offices around the world. ALICO wanted a way to find, delete and/or archive obsolete data and objects in order to reclaim wasted disk space. The company also needed a way to track all of the software in use in each of the operating units. ALICO offices in different parts of the world don’t all use the same software applications. And some offices use different versions of the applications used in other offices Thus, to avoid updating the wrong software when performing application maintenance for one of the offices, the central IT department needed to keep track of which offices use which software versions.

ALICO installed Assure iOptimize to meet these challenges. Assure iOptimize automates many critical System i administration and management tasks and allows them to be run while users remain active on the system. The result is faster application response times and reduced storage costs. Larry Ketzes, Director of Midrange Engineering, reports that the installation of Assure iOptimize was 'absolutely simple.' The IT department uses Assure iOptimize to analyze historical system performance hour-by-hour. Included in this reporting facility is the ability to review disk usage, CPU usage, the number of jobs that were running, and the three most resource-heavy jobs that were running at various times of day. ALICO finds this to be an invaluable tool when it comes to tuning system usage and performance. The historical activity reports are also used as a security tool, allowing ALICO to audit who did what at critical points in the past. The disk storage reporting capabilities of Assure iOptimize allow ALICO’s home office IT department to easily catalog which versions of various applications are in use at each of ALICO’s offices around the world. This reduces the chance of the wrong version of the software being installed in an office when fixes or upgrades are applied to the applications. ALICO also takes advantage of Assure iOptimize’s many automated features to perform regular system 'housecleaning' functions in the background, without the need for any operator intervention. In addition to its extensive query and reporting features, Assure iOptimize offers a customizable Health Report that provides a comprehensive, detailed snapshot of the health of an IBM i server. And, not only does it have a summary of key metrics, but it provides detail pages that give extensive insight into all current operating characteristics of the server. Ketzes feels that it is very helpful to run the Health Report when Assure iOptimize is first installed and then again once every quarter. 'That’s

• Reduced disk storage requirements, leading to improved system performance.
• Enhanced ability to audit past activity comprehensively, improving security and compliance.
• Improved cataloging of applications in use at all offices worldwide, reducing errors in software updates.
• Augmented IT department's troubleshooting capabilities, leading to more efficient issue resolution.
• Performance improvements allowed the company to defer server upgrades, optimizing resource allocation.

• Reduced spool file usage, which improved performance.
• Faster application response times due to automated system management.