Axway, the Business Interactions networks company, has announced that Wirral, the Metropolitan Borough of Merseyside, has saved £2.5m over the last 10 years by using Axway’s Automator solution.
Axway Automator is a complete scheduling solution for automating real-time and near real-time batch processing in increasingly complex infrastructures.
Wirral, which began using Automator in 2000, achieved return on investment (ROI) in the first year and operational profit every year since, said the company.
Axway Automator was chosen because it is a unique system that addresses Wirral’s need to integrate computing tasks across its Unix and Windows platforms, such as automated scheduling, data processing and the management of IT production.
Wirral needed a system which was flexible enough to accommodate future needs. By using Automator’s monitoring and reporting functions, Wirral is able to automate system jobs, react to monitored data exchanges in real time, and apply processing based on time or events, the company said.
Automator controls all the application jobs, batches, services and back-ups, and keeps everything running automatically. Wirral’s IT department no longer works 24/7 shifts, saving costs for the council and giving IT staff more appealing work-patterns.
Wirral Council’s finance department scheduling head Jeff Ashworth said once they realised how powerful Automator is, they immediately exploited everything it has to offer.
Ashworth said, "We let the software run everything for us throughout the night, eliminating the need to pay costly shift allowances as well as the necessary insurance in place to cover the shifts.
Ashworth added, "We implemented the latest release of Automator last November, and the upgrade across all fourteen platforms was seamless…If someone comes to us and asks, ‘Why was the system down for ten minutes three months ago?’ we can tell them exactly what happened. We’ve got very accurate figures and can easily drill in to the detail of the statistics."
Axway vice-president of UK & EMEA Sales & Operations Denis Sennechael said, "We have been working with Wirral for over ten years and it is always great to see a customer taking full advantage of our solutions to manage their business interactions.
"We are very proud that Automator has been such a profitable investment for the Borough and that we have been able to contribute to making the IT department’ more efficient," Sennechael said.
