Merrill Lynch Uses Teleran to Improve Analytical Application Performance

Merrill Lynch, wholly owned by Bank of America, is one of the world's leading providers of wealth management securities trading and sales, corporate finance and investment banking services. Merrill Lynch Global Wealth and Investment Management employs over 15,000 financial advisors world-wide and manages client assets of over $2.2 trillion. Teleran’s software ensures that critical customer-focused analytical applications meet key Merrill Lynch business objectives of satisfying and retaining customers and growing the business.

"As our user community grows, iGuard policies have enabled us to guide and support more people at a reduced cost, maximizing the business value of our applications." 

First vice president of global data management Merrill Lynch

Merrill Lynch Challenge

Private Client applications are supported by the "Midas" data warehouse and include customer segmentation and profitability analysis, cross-selling as well as product-oriented analyses. Midas supports almost 2000 business users across departments including Marketing, Market Research, Sales, Compliance, Accounting and Audit, Operations and Customer Service. The challenge Merrill Lynch faced as the number of business people accessing Midas rapidly expanded was to maintain and improve the availability, performance and effectiveness of this business-critical system.

The support demands of many new dynamic application users required additional user monitoring facilities that Merrill Lynch tried to develop in-house. However, this system proved to be expensive to maintain and in the words of Merrill Lynch VP Business Applications, "only delivered value to IT not the business users." In addition they needed a system that could also actively manage users who do not have an in-depth knowledge of the database as well as a chargeback back mechanism to provide actual resource usage statistics to support their complex budget justification process.

Teleran Solution and Benefits

iSight usage monitoring provides Merrill Lynch quantitative information about what business people use what data and when. From this IT support organizations can understand how Midas is performing and can redesign the database tables to perform better and deliver the right kind of information. In addition, IT uses iSight information to prioritize business intelligence development and maintenance projects.

iGuard query controls and user guidance are used to guide users who don’t have in-depth knowledge of the database, improving ease of use and keeping users from accessing information they do not need to access. iGuard also provides meaningful messages directly to users tailored to their specific issues rather than cryptic system messages.

Teleran’s value to Merrill business users is clear: applications perform better and business-critical information is more accurate and timely. This enables the Private Clients’ group to better understand and sell to their large customer base, increasing revenue, profits and customer satisfaction. Teleran enables Merrill Lynch to understand, track and proactively react to changing business user demands.

Technical Environment

Database: DB2 9.7
Server hardware: IBM AIX
Applications: IBM Cognos, SAS