Aussie (AHL) is a diversified financial services company that offers its customers products including a national mortgage broking service, car and personal loans, general and life Insurance and the low rate Aussie MasterCard®. Aussie Mortgage Brokers represent 16 home loan brands, including all four major banks, while also offering Aussie Home Loans’ own suite of loan products. Aussie was established in February 1992 and has grown to become one of Australia’s leading non-bank retail financial services group, with operations spanning all mainland capital cities and major regional centres.
In 2008, Aussie faced significant organisational changes that drove the need to consolidate and rationalise their entire IT. Aussie’ desired outcome was the creation of an environment that would provide the business with the ability to operate more efficiently and effectively. The changes Aussie faced included:
- Introduction of new products and time to market
- The acquisition of GE Money's mortgage unit, Wizard Home Loans.
- To address these challenges, Aussie went to market to find a partner that could deliver an outsource solution for its entire IT infrastructure. A partner that was both cost effective, who delivered on commitments and who as an expert in their field could provide Aussie with an easy to use solution.
Aussie selected Datacom as their managed services IT outsourcing partner and entered into a 3 year commitment. The decision to award the contract to Datacom was based on:
- Agility and flexibility.
- Open book pricing that allowed Aussie to cut out costs in line with falls in Datacom's cost of providing services.
- Clear and extensive technical capability.
- Openness and transparency of Datacom’s contract process.
- True passion for Aussie’s business.
Aussie decided to extend the term of the Managed Services Agreement with Datacom by another year.
The Datacom Managed Services Solution
The Datacom IT outsource contract delivers national support for the following key services, freeing up Aussie resources and enabling them to focus on their core business.
- Service Desk support for over 2000 calls per month
- Server administration and support for 129 servers
- Database administration
- Desktop support for over 996 laptops/desktops
- Network support for over 200 switches and routers
- Data centre hosting
- Procurement Services
- ITIL Support Services
- Project Services – Storage, AD, Exchange, Citrix, Virtualisation
- Application Development – BizTalk, SharePoint
Datacom Project Services - Wizard Integration Project
Following the acquisition of Wizard Home Loans, Aussie was tasked with extensive challenges around integration, capacity and bandwidth: the core network was at capacity, the storage network was at capacity and they were faced with the challenge of integrating disparate networks and systems. The integration of the Wizard users into the Aussie environment and user acceptance was critical to the success of the acquisition. Datacom was engaged to provide Professional Services to deliver an integrated solution that provided, capacity, scale, efficiencies and would reduce ongoing costs. The catch - this national solution needed to be delivered within a very aggressive 6 week timeline.
Solution
Achieved the business requirements of integrating 300 mortgage advisors within 6 week timeframe.
Provided a Citrix environment running atop of a virtualised server infrastructure, organising training venues and user creation and support for the new users.
Incorporated range of vendor offerings packaged up as one as the answer to their business needs.
Results Realised
The Datacom partnership offers Aussie something different: complete openness and transparency of pricing — including a fully flexible commitment that allows Aussie to change all or part of the contract at 90 days notice.
Datacom has worked with Aussie to enable rapid business change supported by technology. Aussie successfully achieved integration of the Wizard acquisition within the eight week transition, allowing for the organisation to successful deliver solutions to their clients.
James O’Donnell Aussie’ CIO commented:.
"This means that as I make efficiency gains, which drives down Datacom's costs to serve me, I can capture that value out of the contract," he said.
"We awarded them the contract because of their clear and extensive technical capability, the openness and transparency of their contract process and they had a real passion for our business, which is broking, not IT," said Aussie Home Loans Chief Information Officer James O'Donnell.
Key Points
- The agility and flexibility of the Datacom relationship, is a proven delivery model that supports and enables the rapid business changes required by Aussie.
- The transparency of the contract provides Aussie with the opportunity to manage costs and measure efficiencies within the business.
- Impact of the acquisition of Wizard - Aussie increased its broker team by 100% and was able to leverage the scale advantage of partnering with Datacom. Datacom was able to absorb the growth in Aussie’ business without any significant increase in the cost for support services.