CI Investments

Industry:

Finance

Environment:

BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Intel, SUN and IBM AIX Applications

Overview

CI Investments Inc. is an independent, Canadian-owned wealth management company with approximately $65 billion in assets under management. CI offers a broad range of investment products and services.

In the financial industry, CI Investments is faced with the challenge of increased competition and increased demand for critical information and business applications anytime, anywhere. At the same time, maintaining the highest level of security and integrity of confidential information is always top of mind.

Situation

With more than 600 BlackBerry users, 1400 corporate staff, and 1200 advisors, CI Investments was faced with the challenge of increased demand for critical applications 24/7.

Organization Profile

CI Investments Inc. is an independent, Canadian-owned wealth management company with approximately $65 billion in assets under management.

The Challenge

CI Investments has over 230 servers and more than 600 BlackBerry users. CI IT administrators support over 1900 corporate staff and 1200 off-site advisors across Canada. With the business growing and the reputation of the systems continuously at stake, CI’s IT Department needed to ensure their systems were up and running and that mission-critical applications were accessible by all staff, advisors and customers 24/7. At the same time, there was an increase in demand for after-hours IT support.

Knowing that the solution was to find an application to manage their IT infrastructure from anywhere, Mike Moheiti, IT Director at CI Investments, also knew that the application needed to have robust security where all data, servers and networks would be protected.

Evaluating the Solution

Moheiti found out about Mobile Admin through a search engine. “Mobile Admin jumped out at us because of its robust security and sheer amount of features. During the free trial period, it was determined that Mobile Admin had the necessary capabilities and functionailty. My colleagues and I understood how the existing support process would be improved. We were definetly impressed” said Moheiti.

The benefits of Mobile Admin were felt within the first few days of the trial. “We had faster response times and more satisfied customers.The VP of Infrastructure Services was easily sold on the merits of Mobile Admin.”

Flexibility and Peace of Mind

With the ability to manage an entire IT infrastructure from a handheld device, Mobile Admin has given IT administrators a much appreciated increase in productivity and efficiency.

Before Mobile Admin troubleshooting problems when on-call was time-consuming.The on-call IT administrator would need to find a place with an internet connection in order to VPN into the environment, or else drive into the office from home. “Our admins would always need to carry their laptops. This made activities like grocery shopping and going out with the family for dinner very cumbersome.”

“Now my team is able to support users from anywhere. They can reset passwords, restart servers and restart services from their handheld devices. With Mobile Admin, restarting a server from the car is common practice. In one instance, a mail gateway went down and an IT administrator was able to quickly restart a service from the check-out line at a grocery store within minutes. In that instance, pulling out a laptop would have been unfeasable.” The entire department takes pride in knowing that Mobile Admin has robust encryption and authentication measures.

Results

The results have been very impressive. “Along with a better quality of life, we have quick access to the systems from anywhere and have reduced our network downtime. This truly is a win-win situation for our admins, our company and our customers.” said Moheiti.