London Scottish Bank takes assets to task

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London Scottish Bank, the specialist financial services company, has recently purchased 700 licences of new discovery and software asset management tools to help manage IT procurement and maintenance of all the desktops and laptops across the distributed organisation.

The bank's IT staff have to manage the IT assets across over 70 different sites around the UK in support of over 2,000 staff, who operate in a range of markets, including personal loans and secured lending. But this was becoming an increasingly time consuming task, so the firm decided to find a system that would provide complete visibility of its network.

William Hewish, London Scottish Bank's IT director said that, of the software asset management (SAM) suite licences it has purchased from software vendor Centennial Software, 300 will be used on the company's laptops.

"The SAM suite addresses the challenges we have around mobile working, as well in managing our software assets from one central location, where we don't have the capability to have an IT team at every site," he told IT PRO.

"We had previously found it very difficult to keep complete control of our IT assets, relying on quite cumbersome, manual processes to keep track of the transfer of computers between new and existing users."

He said London Scottish Bank will use Centennial SAM.Suite to improve the management of software assets, cancel unnecessary software licences and transfer licences where new orders are received, which it expects will lead to considerable cost savings within the first year of use.

Hewish added: "Tracking all our assets across so many sites was becoming more and more challenging. The Centennial SAM.Suite will simplify and speed up the previously lengthy manual process. It will also help us make significant savings on all our software."

After having deployed the licences only a couple of months ago, Hewish also said the granularity of detail about the company's IT estate is already helping streamline IT procurement, where the roll out of new encryption software for its laptops can be better matched to the age and compatibility of each individual laptop.

And the bank will also be using the Suite to help drive the adoption of best practice, IT Information Library (ITIL) processes within its Service Desk function. By making detailed information on installed software and hardware assets visible within the Service Desk system, he said the tools will enable the Bank to improve first-time fix rate and execution against service level agreements (SLAs) as well as levels of end-user satisfaction.

In addition to purchasing the SAM.Suite, which comprises Centennial Discovery and Centennial License Manager, London Scottish Bank has also taken on Discovery.Visual for network mapping as well as a subscription to the vendor's Software Information Portal, to help the London Scottish better understand applications use across its network.

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