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SolarWinds takes 'trial and error' out of Philippine Veterans Bank's network management
Fri, 20th Aug 2010
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Since implementing SolarWinds’ Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) solution, Philippine Veterans Bank has streamlined its network management and eliminated any trial and error from network diagnostics.

Established in 1963 by Philippines World War II veterans and their families, the Philippine Veterans Bank (PVB) caters to both corporate and retail financial markets, and as part of its charter, provides 20% of its annual net income for the benefit of its shareholders.

The bank was ordered to close in 1983 by the government, but reopened in 1992 as a private commercial bank, giving up all government control. Since its reopening, the bank has grown rapidly, opening new branches in the countryside. Today, PVB has 63 branch locations, 50 offsite stations and employs close to 800 staff.

Like many new businesses starting out, PVB had not considered a network management and monitoring strategy. Home-grown solutions made due for a while, but as the bank grew, so did its network and accompanying challenges. The systems in place were no longer sophisticated enough or sufficient for the bank’s evolving needs.

The ‘old tools’ fell short when they couldn’t quickly determine the causes of application slowdowns and downtimes over the network. In addition, not being able to pinpoint where IT issues originated was causing a disruption in users’ work time and creating a divide between the network and server teams.

“The pressure was always on the network side to declare that the problems encountered in the applications are not caused by the network infrastructure but somewhere else. We needed a Network Monitoring System that could provide immediate assessment of the health of the network, including the peripherals that are connected to it so we will know where and why there is a network or related issue,” said Edgardo S. Dajao, PVB vice president, IT operations division.

After seeing the demos and reviewing SolarWinds’ Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) at a product presentation event, PVB made the decision to become a SolarWinds customer with its purchase of Orion NPM.

“We evaluated a few of the other enterprise solutions thoroughly, but Orion’s functionalities and features best suited our requirements and was the most cost-effective solution for the bank,” said Dajao. “Plus, it had strong customer feedback regarding support, which was also very important to us.”

With Orion NPM, PVB is able to track network performance at a glance, using real-time views and dashboards, making it easy to identify and show evidence whether a problem exists on the network or the server side.

PVB is then able to focus its efforts to execute and resolve the problem in a much faster and efficient manner. As a result, network uptime is maximised and users are satisfied.

“SolarWinds helped improve our process of managing our network, enabling us to be able to respond faster to issues and be pro-active in dealing with capacity related matters and possible network weaknesses,” said Dajao. “Our corrective actions are now guided, unlike before when our diagnostics took a considerable amount of time and we resolved problems often by trial and error.”

For more information

Audrey Too

Marketing Manager

APAC

SolarWinds

+65.6593 7607

Audrey.too@solarwinds.com