IT system Cost Reduction - BMO Capital Markets

Enhanced Application Presentation

As BMO Capital Markets opens new offices in Asia, Manta expects the company to reduce administrative and maintenance costs by centralizing applications on servers in Canada rather than maintaining installations on multiple servers and desktops in China and Hong Kong. BMO Capital Markets began this centralization process by publishing applications over the Web using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition and Citrix Presentation Server™ from Microsoft Terminal Services Partner Citrix Systems. Going forward, the company is excited about the enhanced Terminal Services features of Windows Server 2008, including Terminal Services RemoteApp.

BMO Capital Markets is investigating how the company can use the new Terminal Services features to increase the ease and speed of expanding into international markets by eliminating the need to deploy new infrastructure.

"Just by eliminating the need for infrastructure," Manta says, "we can save about $150,000 in capital costs for every office that we open in Asia, and we've opened four so far. That's more than half a million dollars already. When you include the costs of facilities and ongoing support, the savings will keep adding up."

Increased Performance and Cost Savings

BMO Capital Markets is using 64-bit architecture to achieve additional savings by reducing hardware requirements. "We can add memory and linearly scale out as much as we need to, up to 350 users per server, which is more than double the previous capacity," says Manta. "That's an immediate cost benefit because the average cost of a physical server platform is about $10,000. Windows Server 2008 should reduce the number of servers we need, as well as the associated support costs, by at least 30 percent—a savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars right off the bat."

BMO Capital Markets also anticipates that the stability of Windows Server 2008 will reduce systems failures and disaster recovery time, which will reduce downtime. "From what we have tested in production labs, Windows Server 2008 is stable," says Manta. "We expected to see this in the latest version of Microsoft's flagship operating system, and our tests of the prerelease versions have confirmed it."


Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008, with built-in web and virtualization technologies, enables you to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server infrastructure. New virtualization tools, web resources, and security enhancements help you save time, reduce costs, and provide a platform for a dynamic and optimized datacenter. Powerful new tools like IIS 7.0, Server Manager, and Windows PowerShell™, allow you to have more control over your servers and streamline web, configuration, and management tasks. Advanced security and reliability enhancements like Network Access Protection and the Read-Only Domain Controller option for Active Directory® Domain Services harden the operating system and protect your server environment to ensure you have a solid foundation on which to build your business.

http://www.microsoft.com/canada/casestudies/bmocapitalmarkets.mspx