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Success
Case Studies | Industry Recognition
Guardian Group of Funds -
Application Portals
The Partner: Guardian
Group of Funds (GGOF)
GGOF’s business is the management, marketing, and wholesale distribution of
mutual funds. The extensive range of global investment products is offered
to investors through financial intermediaries. Assets have grown from over
$125 million in 1990 to in excess of $2 billion to date. GGOF was founded in
1962 as a subsidiary of Guardian Capital Group Limited and on July 19th 2001
Bank of Montreal (BMO) purchased all outstanding shares of GGOF from
Guardian Capital Group Limited.
The Challenge:
Deliver business critical head office applications to
branches while significantly reducing support costs.
At the hearth of GGOF’s business is Client Relationship Management (CRM)
mission critical application. Project goal was to review and enhance current
method of managing and delivering this application to reduce overall
maintenance requirements and costs for branch offices as well as for
internal users.
The Solution: Server Based Computing delivered
dramatic savings and
enhancements.
Today GGOF’s employees in Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa and other locations
across Canada enjoy quick response times of their CRM application while IT
support department significantly benefits from related workload and
application maintenance reductions. No longer does the IT staff have to
visit every single desktop when deploying software updates to their CRM
application. Now a single update is performed on the Citrix server farm
significantly reducing TCO of this application. Upon realizing the power and
Return on Investment from Server Based Computing, GGOF has decided to add
other applications to the portal such as document distribution. The Server
Based Solution at GGOF is based on Citrix MetaFrame XPa using NFuse Classic
in a load balanced configuration with 3 thin Compaq Servers.
The Value: Significant application support &
maintenance cost reduction,
dramatically enhanced application performance.
Immediately after project completion GGOF started receiving benefits from
implementing the Citrix Server Based Computing solution. GGOF’s estimate for
reduction in maintenance costs for their CRM application is 60%. CRM
application performance and responsiveness was increased by 80% in the
branches, internal application users’ satisfaction with IT services was
increased by 30%. But what it counts the most, GGOF was able to enhance its
client services resulting in revenue increase.
The Recognition
"After seeing some of the work completed for another large mutual fund
company, GGOF awarded Lanworks to build and deploy new server based
computing solution. Based on Citrix Metaframe XP, Lanworks built a robust
load balanced server farm which meets and exceeds our original objectives.
Lanworks has been a reliable technology provider throughout this rollout and
we continue to further widen & strengthen our business partnership."
Ray Wilson, IT Director, Guardian
Group of Funds
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