BSM and IT Data Access Improvement at Swiss Insurer and
Turkish Mobile Carrier Spur New Business Benefits
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how two organizations have been improving their
application’s performance via total performance monitoring and metrics.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: HP.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator
for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an
impact on people's lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT
to improve IT performance, gain new insights and deliver better user experiences,
as well as better overall business results. We're here to learn how big data changes
everything, for IT, for businesses, and governments, as well as for you and me.
Our next innovation case study panel discussion explores how improved business service
management and data access improvements at a Swiss insurance company and a Turkish mobile
phone carrier help to spur new business benefits and IT performance issues resolution.
By more deeply examining how applications are performing via total performance monitoring
and metrics these enterprises slash mean time to resolution and later significantly reduce the
number of IT incidents.
Track your app's user experience with Fundex
Download the infographic
Fix poor performing mobile apps
To learn more about how to build high confidence that IT disruptions can be managed and even
headed off, please join me in welcoming our panelists.
We're here with Thomas Baumann, IT Performance Architect at Swiss Mobiliar in Bern.
Welcome, Thomas.
Thomas Baumann: Hello, Dana.
Gardner: Nice to have you with us. We're also here with Merve Duran, Management System
Specialist at Avea in Istanbul. Welcome to the show.
Gardner

Merve Duran: Hello, Dana.
Gardner: Let’s start with you, Thomas. Tell us a little bit about Swiss Mobiliar and what you’re
doing to increase the performance of your applications.
Largest insurance company
Baumann: Swiss Mobiliar is Switzerland’s largest personal insurance company. It’s also the
oldest insurance company, founded in 1826, a couple of years ago, and every
third household is insured at Swiss Mobiliar. We are number one in household
contents insurance.
My role at Swiss Mobiliar is Minister of Performance. I'm responsible for
optimizing all the applications, infrastructure, etc.
Gardner: Tell us a bit about the challenges that you’ve had in terms of keeping
all of your applications performing. Maybe you could even offer us an idea of the scale -- the
number of end users you have that you support with those applications.
Baumann: There are about 4,500 internal users, but we also deliver applications directly to our
customers. So that makes a group of users that’s about 2.5 million.
Gardner: What are your goals? What requirements have you been trying to meet in terms of
better performance and how do you go about achieving that?
Baumann: About three years ago, we had a very reactive service model. We were only listening
to customers or users complaining about bad response times, unresolved tickets.
and things like that. Additionally, our event console was at the end of life. So we
were thinking about a more comprehensive solution.
We chose HP’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) and HP’s Operations Management i
(OMi) to help us decrease our mean time to repair and to get a better
understanding of end-user performance and how our applications are used by our
customers.
Gardner: Thomas, how important is the acquisition of data and the use of that data? Have you
changed either your attitude or culture when it comes to being data-driven, as a path to this better
performance?
Baumann: Yes. Initially we had very little data, and data that was generated by syntactical
measurements. Now, we measure real end-user traffic at all times, at all locations, and from all
users, for the top applications that we have. We don’t use it for all applications.
Baumann
Duran

Gardner: Do you have any sense of performance metrics and improvements? How do you
measure your success?
Performance index
Baumann: Regarding end-user response times, we created something like a performance
index, comparable to New York Stock Exchange's Dow Jones Index. Calculating
the average response times of the most important functions of an application and
the mean time of all these response times gives us this performance score value.
We started in 2012, and there was a performance score value of 100, just to have a
base level where we can measure the improvement. Now, with an important sales
application, we're at 220, an increase of a factor of 2.2 in performance.
Gardner: Have you been able to translate that through some sort of a feedback loop or the
ability to predict where problems either are or are beginning, so that you can head off problems
altogether. Has that been something you’ve been able to achieve?
Track your app's user experience with Fundex
Download the infographic
Fix poor performing mobile apps
Baumann: Yes. OMi helped us to achieve this, because now we're able to detect very small
incidents before they start to impact our service. In many cases we can avoid a major incident or
a large problem that would lead to an availability problem in our company just by analyzing
those very small defects or incidents that are detected by our machines.
Gardner: Before your customers and users detect them?
Baumann: Exactly. Sometimes you tell the customers that they have to do this and this, and
they're very surprised because they didn't know there was a problem before I mentioned it.
Dane Gardner: Let’s now go to Merve at Avea. Tell us a little bit about your company, how
large it is, and what you’re doing to improve your application’s performance?
Duran: Avea, is the sole GSM 1-800 mobile operator of Turkey and was founded in 2004. It’s
the youngest operator in Turkey, and we perform as management at Avea’s IT domain.
Gardner: What did you put in place and what were you trying to improve upon as you’ve gone
to a higher level of performance? How did you want to measure that? How did you want to
improve?

Duran: As an example, we have more than 20 mobile applications in Avea for iOS and Android-
based devices. We know that these applications get approximately 525 hits in a day and we know
that the response times of these hits play a significant role in the overall user experience.
Also we know that mobile users are much less tolerant to application errors, slow response times
and poor usability. That’s why we need to manage our mobile application performance. So we
are using HP Real and Synthetic User Mobile Monitoring solutions in Avea.
Metrics of success
Gardner: Have you been able to measure and determine how that performance has improved?
What you’ve been able to use to determine the success of your activities?
Duran: Before this solution, we had almost no end-user data on hand, so root cause analysis was
too hard for us and it took long times when a problem occurred. Also We didn't know how many
problem were occurring. With this solution, we can do the root cause analysis and we know how
many issues are occurred. Before this solution, we only found out if the customers complain. So
the mobile RUM and BPM solution is quite important for us.
Gardner: Okay, great. Looking to the future, Thomas, where do you see things going next?
What’s the next plane of improvement when it comes to applications. It’s like a journey. You
never get to your destination. You're always trying to improve things. Where do you see
yourselves going next at your organization?
Baumann: For now, we use RUM to analyze response times. What we start to do now is analyze
the behavior of the user: how are they using our applications? We can improve the workflow of
whole business process by analyzing how the applications are used, who is using them, from
which location, et cetera.
Gardner: And do you see the data that you’re gathering and using, being used in other aspects of
IT? Does this have an adjacency benefit in some way, or is this something that you're just using
specifically for application performance?
Baumann: For now, we use it specifically for application performance, but we see large
opportunities to mix these data with other data to get more insight and have a greater overview of
how applications are used.
Maybe we can compare it to an airplane. We were flying as a contact flight and now we've
migrated to instrumental flight. We also have those black boxes so we can analyze how all those
measurements developed over the last period, what happened exactly before the crash, or in
general how the systems are used and how we can improve it.

Gardner: That's a very good analogy. It's one thing to just get to your destination. Now, you can
make that much more scientific and understood. Therefore, you can devise your future based on a
plan rather than a reaction. That's important.
I just want to go in one more direction before we end, and that would be the type of applications
that you're using. Do you see more of a feedback loop to your developers? You're doing most of
your activity in operations, but as we know that the better you design an application, the better it
will then perform.
DevOps is an important trend these days. Do you see yourselves as application performance
professionals starting to have more impact on the development process of feedback of
information to developers, maybe the next generation of an application, or may be for entirely
new applications. Any thoughts Merve?
Quite helpful
Duran: For BPM mobile solution, yes, this is quite helpful for us, because we can use this
solution when we develop a new release of application. So it will be good to test it before new
application releases.
Gardner: Thomas, any thoughts about bringing your information and intelligence back into
testing or even development itself?
Baumann: For development, it's more difficult. We still develop a couple of applications, but
most of them we purchase. So there isn't much direct influence on development. But for testing
there are a lot of possibilities.
Gardner: Very good. We've been learning about how two organizations have been improving
their application’s performance via total performance monitoring and metrics. We've been talking
with a Swiss insurance company and a Turkish mobile phone carrier.
Track your app's user experience with Fundex
Download the infographic
Fix poor performing mobile apps
I'd like to thank our guests. We've been joined by Thomas Baumann, IT Performance Architect at
Swiss Mobiliar in Bern. Thank you, sir.
Baumann: Thank you.
Gardner: And also Merve Duran, Management System Specialist at Avea in Istanbul. Thank
you.
Duran: Thank you too.

Gardner: I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of
IT discussion. We've explored solid evidence from early enterprise adopters about how big data
changes everything for IT, for businesses and governments, as well as for you and me.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how two organizations have been improving their
application’s performance via total performance monitoring and metrics. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.
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