Cristie Software November News Bulletin

Read the latest Cristie Software News Update 

November 2012 Update

Welcome to the Cristie Software News Bulletin! What a packed edition of the bulletin we have this month with the launch of our latest product announced! CloneManager has been in development for most of the year and we are very proud that it has already gained a huge amount of interest including a global outsourcing company who are looking to employ it as their main migration software! We also have a new employee to introduce to you, a new customer case study to read, a new product discussion group launched and some new collateral to keep you up-to-date with our product news. We hope that you have had a successful start to Q4 and please get in touch if we can help support any deals that you have in the pipeline or if you need any advice for new software for your own business. If you currently purchase our solutions TBMR and CBMR through IBM - read the latest blog post about changes to how to purchase, with a move to IBM's Passport Advantage. Why not keep in touch with what we are getting up to by following us on Twitter @CristieSoftware, LinkedIn and on our blog site. All the best, Natalie Schofield, International Marketing Manager Product News...  Introducing the latest solution from Cristie Software - CloneManager: CloneManager –the latest solution announced for release very soon! CloneManager enables machine migrations and server moves on an easy to use drag and drop GUI. For more information visit the website at www.clonemanager.com Read the full the Press Release here View the CloneManager Datasheet download Have a look at the CloneManager PowerPoint Presentation download For more information on pricing and beta testing contact us here Interested in finding out more? We will be arranging a number of introduction product webinars, if you are interested in registering for one of these online events please email us and once the dates are released we will forward you the information. For webinars or further product information please email sales here. Customer Case Study... Read how Kwik Fit Financial Services have used in TBMR to support their operations and business continuity plans. “Sometimes a good hardware maintenance contract and a good data backup schedule just isn't enough to ensure that services can be recovered quickly. Our experience shows that there is a significant gap here and we are relying more and more on TBMR to fill this gap.”- Duncan Waddell, Second Line Team Lead, KFFS Kwik Data Recovery Called For As Server Fails For Main Customer Contact Centre Kwik-Fit Financial Services relies on a number of fileservers running software applications which are key to the day to day operations of the business. Running a fully operational contact centre is essential to keep customer service levels high and ensure that the corporate aims of a fast, courteous and professional service are maintained. Following a corruption of the OS disks on one of the critical fileservers, it took several days to recover fully and had a major impact on the service level... Read the full case study here New LinkedIn TBMR Customer Group... We want to hear from you! We have launched a new product development and discussion group for all of our TBMR customers and associates. You can help share best practices, discuss experiences and new features, helping aid Cristie to shape the TBMR future product roadmap. The group Cristie Software TBMR Product Discussions & Development, offers you the chance to make valuable contibutions to future improvements and developments for our products or maybe make suggestions of other new solutions or new products integrations, that would help resolve your business' disaster recovery, data protection and migration issues. We hope you will join us and become part of the Cristie world-wide discussion and development community. We are also looking at creating these type of groups for our other solutions - get in touch if you would be interested in joining other product groups - email me at natalie.schofield@cristie.com Join in the TBMR conversation today by applying for membership here http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Cristie-Software-TBMR-Product-Discussions-4692242 New Collateral... We have created new PowerPoint presentations introducing our product range for you to use: View the PowerPoint Presentations here: Cristie Software Introduction CBMR Introduction TBMR Introduction NBMR Introduction and CloneManager (CCM) Introduction Along with a range of new Sector overviews. We hope you find them useful as reference points: Healthcare sector overview Banking sector overview Government sector overview Retail sector overview Introductions... We would like to introduce you to our newest member of staff to join the Cristie Software family: CLAIR BROWN Accounts Manager Clair who has managed a successful book keeping company, joins the company part-time to help run the accounts team. We are very pleased that Clair has joined us as she brings an invaluable skill-set to the company. Other News... The Green IT Strategy – cloud and e-procurement take center stage CIO Jennifer Rigby, Department of Energy and Climate Change announced the driving forces of the Government’s green IT strategy, as cloud and e-procurement whilst speaking at the Efficient ICT: 2012 Conference at Westminster in Central London... Read the full blog post here Bare Machine Recovery for TSM and NetWorker: Include BMR in your Disaster Recovery plan simply by adding one of Cristie Software’s BMR bolt-on solutions. At Cristie Software we can enhance the capabilities of both IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC NetWorker with solutions that add essential Bare Machine Recovery functionality... Read the full blog post here Cristie Software Ltd, New Mill, Chestnut Lane, Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 3EH Website: www.cristie.com Email: sales@cristie.com

Kwik data recovery called for as server fails for main customer contact centre

Cristie Software's latest Customer Case Study: Kwik-Fit Financial Services.

Product: TBMR

Overview

Launched in 1995 to provide an insurance offering to customers of Kwik-Fit garages, Kwik-Fit Insurance has grown rapidly in the 17 years since to become one of the UK’s leading personal lines insurance intermediaries.

Originally offering car insurance, the intermediary has expanded to incorporate a host of personal lines offerings including home insurance and breakdown cover with around one million live products. Kwik-Fit Insurance was the forerunner for what has become the Kwik-Fit Financial Services group. KFI is the largest broker in a group which also includes Express Insurance, the specialist car and motorbike intermediary (acquired in 2007) and The Green Insurance Company, an environmentally friendly intermediary who offset customer’s cars carbon emissions (launched in 2007).

KFFS was bought by Ageas (UK) Ltd in 2010 to strengthen their retail operations which include RIAS, Ageas Insurance Solutions and Castle Cover.

The Challenge

KFFS relies on a number of Fileservers running software applications which are key to the day to day operations of the business. Running a fully operational contact centre is essential to keep customer service levels high and ensure that the corporate aims of a fast, courteous and professional service are maintained.

Following a corruption of the OS disks on one of the critical fileservers, it took several days to recover fully and had a major impact on the service level.  The decision was taken to look into how best to reduce outage time involved in this kind of problem to an absolute minimum and avoid experiencing such a detrimental outage again.

The Solution

TBMR was introduced to KFFS by their IBM partner Barrachd as a product that was unique in the way it worked closely with their existing backup software (TSM), meaning that it could be introduced with a relatively small amount of extra work and could be maintained alongside their normal backup schedule.

TBMR was installed to protect a number of the most critical servers for the contact centre to help get recovery times significantly reduced in the event of another failure and to reduce vulnerability to customer service levels.

The Resulting Benefit

TBMR installation on the contact centres’ critical servers has given great peace of mind to management and have yet to be ‘used in anger’ to recover from a failure. The further implementation of TBMR is now being evaluated to extend coverage to other parts of the estate after recently suffered a glitch and having both OS disks on a document scanning fileserver fail at the same time, which led to four days of solid work to get the application running again and the database restored.  Purchase costs of TBMR to protect servers that are less critical to the business but still involve extensive time and effort on behalf of the support teams to recover, are justified when evaluated against this kind of manual recovery.

“Sometimes a good hardware maintenance contract and a good data backup schedule just isn't enough to ensure that services can be recovered quickly.  Our experience shows that there is a significant gap here and we are relying more and more on TBMR to fill this gap.” - Duncan Waddell, Second Line Team Lead, KFFS

TBMR Product Overview

TBMR provides fast automated recovery for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) users. In the event of a server failure, TBMR will recover the operating system and applications direct from the TSM backup. The recovery can be to the original or to new dissimilar hardware or to a virtual machine.

• IBM recommended solution for BMR for TSM - find out more
• Rebuild a server OS in under ten minutes
• Uses the TSM backups for Disaster Recovery
• Multiple servers can be recovered simultaneously
• TBMR is the ONLY software that can recover direct from the TSM server without performing a separate backup

Find out more at:
www.cristie.com/products/disaster-recovery/tbmr

Contact Cristie Software

Email: sales@cristie.com
Tel: +44 1453 847000
Web: www.cristie.com