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Connect 11 : Aon Corporation U.K.
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Smart Solutions : VTD8 brings resilience, speed to Aon UK
Aon Corporation is a holding company comprised of a family of insurance brokerages, consulting service providers, and insurance underwriting subsidiaries. Aon is recognized as a world leader in insurance and consulting services and has grown exponentially since 1982 with 1997 annual revenue reaching approximately $5.8 billion. Aon's 40 000 employees are distributed across more than 600 offices located in more than 115 countries worldwide from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Companies of all kinds look to Aon Risk Services for comprehensive risk management solutions including exposure identification, insurance placement, claims management, loss control, and administrative services.
Aon UK, (Aon Risk Services) delivers industry-specialized services focused on providing cost-effective risk-management expertise combined within the framework of their strategic account management concept. Aon UK's I.T. Department supports 3500 users in a network linking 52 sites to their main offices in Glasgow, London, Sheffield, and Manchester. Aon Risk Services' depth of intellectual capital, familiarity with their proprietary services, and strategic account-management approach, make them experts in understanding all types of risk. Ian Manson, Head of Technical Services understood the risks associated with replacing mainframe terminals with PC Desktops. He stated Aon has been using Bull systems for 20+ years and "In 1999 we migrated from terminals to PC Desktops and required a rock-solid emulator for the 500 users accessing our TDS [mainframe] application."
Aon UK: reducing the migration risks
Aon UK's IT Management looked for a solution that would reduce internal risks during this migration. "Micro-Matic Research was recommended by our IT-supplier and together we looked at their VTD8 product to assure speedy access for our Glasgow headquarters as well as all other users located all over the UK. VTD8 became the obvious choice in our migration path. After several months of exhaustive testing to make sure all of our applications were performing as well as before, we implemented VTD8.
The greatest benefits of VTD8 are resilience and speed. Resilience because of the centrally managed gateway solution, DR recovery on the total network, and the hardware reliability of the VTD8 cards. Aon has never had to replace any of it's VTD8 cards, EVER! The speed factor was instantly noticeable to the users who converted from a Terminal to the PC environment because of the conversion from ISO/DSA to TCP/IP. This also meant that we could now isolate all Aon WAN traffic to the TCP/IP network. As to the benefit of speed, we required that PC applications such as text processing and spreadsheets not be slowed when sharing bandwidth with the mainframe fed data. Our tests showed no noticeable decrease in performance."
Manson concludes: "Our investments and year-long effort switching from the mainframe terminals to the PC world paid off successfully. Most of all, our users tell me the conversion outperformed their expectations. VTD8 has now become an even more efficient platform for the delivery of the highest quality professional services to our customers and distribution channels."
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