Financial Services Institute of Australasia (Finsia)

Membership organisation implements managed IT solution and saves 60% on internal solutions management costs.

About Finsia

The Financial Services Institute of Australasia (Finsia) is Australasia’ s premier membership organisation for the financial services industry, with more than 20,000 professional members. It was formed in 2005, following the successful merger of the Securities Institute of Australia and the Australasian Institute of Banking and Finance. In 2007, Finsia sold the education component of its business to Kaplan Professional. Finsia is the only professional association to represent the entire spectrum of financial services across Australasia – including the wealth management, banking & finance and capital markets sectors. Finsia employs approximately 36 staff and has offices throughout Australia and in New Zealand.

The Challenge

The sale of Finsia’ s education business in 2007 provided an ideal opportunity for the organisation to reassess their IT strategy and needs. They undertook extensive research and analysis to establish the IT needs of the business and the costs of managing a new IT solution
internally.

“ We conducted research to establish the costs of internally managing a new IT solution. The potential costs we needed to assess included building a robust data centre, communication links, network and server infrastructure purchasing hardware and software and training staff to implement and maintain it all,” said David Kennedy, Manager IT Services, Finsia.

“ When we broke down the potential cost of building and managing an internal IT solution, we decided to explore the option of managed IT services.”

The Solution

Finsia decided to conduct a full Request For Proposal (RFP) process to review and select a suitable end-to-end solution. They selected Wavenet, an IntraPower Group (ASX: IPX) company to provide a tailored Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

“ We selected Wavenet, an IntraPower Group company, as the best provider overall. Wavenet was able to manage the entire solution and implementation without outsourcing to an array of partners. This provided us with one point of contact, which ensured a smoother
transition process,” said Kennedy.

SaaS is an on-demand, scalable software solution that provides applications via a private network (or the Internet) for a monthly subscription fee. The applications are hosted by IntraPower in a secure data centre. The hosted desktop also means that applications and data are securely accessible from any PC – anywhere in the world.

The Finsia solution links all office locations to IntraPower’ s secure managed private network which hosts the SaaS solution. All Finsia data and applications including Microsoft Office as well as finance and membership systems are delivered centrally through this secure private network, which reduces the headache of managing the IT systems internally. Wavenet also deployed thin PC’ s and notebooks across all sites as well as a complete IP PABX solution throughout the Finsia network.

“ Overall the implementation was incredibly smooth. After signing contracts, we agreed on a timeline and work schedule which Wavenet adhered to during the entire implementation. The solution went live in December 2007,” added Kennedy.

The Benefits

“ Wavenet’ s proposed SaaS strategy offered a phenomenal 60% saving on the cost of managing our IT internally. Their flexibility, understanding of what we wanted to achieve and competitive pricing made their solution compelling,” said Kennedy.

“ Apart from the undeniable cost benefit of SaaS, the greatest benefit is being able to outsource the maintenance, upgrades and data protection with full confidence. Our downtime is significantly reduced – with all maintenance and upgrading scheduled for off-peak times – which has also made a considerable difference to our overall productivity,” he added.

As a result of the implementation solution, Finsia has had negligible downtime, maximum efficiency and productivity for a Fixed IT Cost per month – with no additional capital expenditure for the entire IT future.

With a SaaS model applications, system upgrades, maintenance, data protection and disaster recovery strategies are outsourced, freeing up resources and in house IT staff. This is a major business benefit, with in house IT staff able to focus on driving the broader IT strategy across the company as opposed to undertaking

Summary

With the Wavenet solution in place, Finsia has saved 60% on the cost of managing their IT internally. The flexibility provided by the solution ensures continued business efficiency, adaptability and compliance. Wavenet’ s SaaS solution gives companies of all sizes an opportunity to pass-on the burden of software maintenance, upgrades, licensing,
disaster recovery planning and troubleshooting so they can get on with expanding their businesses.