ANIMA, Italy’s Largest Fund Manager, Reduces Operational Costs by 50% and Business Processing Time by 30% with New Database and Middleware
 
 

ANIMA, Italy’s Largest Fund Manager, Reduces Operational Costs by 50% and Business Processing Time by 30% with New Database and Middleware

  • Oracle Customer:  ANIMA SgR
    Location:  Milan, Italy
    Industry:  Financial Services
    Employees:  190
    Annual Revenue:  $100 to $500 Million

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ANIMA SgR is Italy’s largest independent asset manager, with assets of more than US$52 billion. Today, ANIMA has a range of products and services, including providing legal documentation, mutual and pension funds, individual financial management, and institutional management. The organization offers various types of investment funds and supplementary pension schemes for companies and individuals, as well as asset management and institutional asset markets.

The current company structure of ANIMA was officially established in December 2011 through a merger of ANIMA and Prima Sgr, spurring a need to merge two disparate IT systems. ANIMA chose Oracle as its database to centralize critical business activities, including fund information and fund management. In addition, as a savings management company that must comply with Italian regulations, ANIMA supervises fund activities and publishes valuations daily. Meeting these requirements involves performing complex calculations based on a large number of daily capital transactions, so the company decided to implement a solution that would ensure 24/7 system availability. It chose Oracle because of Oracle’s scalability and ability to support a large and ever-increasing data flow and fund volume. The new infrastructure enabled the company to realize an annual 50% cost savings and 30% time reduction in performing business-critical processes.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from ANIMA SgR

  • “Before joining ANIMA, I had used Oracle for many years, so when ANIMA tasked me with choosing the best solution for our company, I had no doubts about selecting Oracle. For performance, flexibility, and reliability, Oracle solutions are unrivalled—the best option for companies like ANIMA, where speed, safety, and security are critical success factors.” – Cristiano Ziletti, Application Development Manager, ANIMA SgR

  • Facilitate company development with a scalable and dynamic IT infrastructure that provides the flexibility to handle company mergers, business growth, and financial services requirements (such as managing fund information and valuation)
  • Ensure high availability and business continuity to centralize operations in-house through customized, business-critical IT solutions that calculate the value of the fund for its investors at the end of each day
  • Provide flashbacks and fast-recovery solutions, quickly

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Optimized business processes and saved 50% of costs and 30% of processing time, yearly, in fund information management (regarding such things as fund details, data modification, and fund valorization)
  • Implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager to manage middleware and business intelligence applications related to fund value calculation
  • Implemented Oracle Real Application Clusters to manage requests for fund details, data modification, and fund valorization that are distributed between the two new servers
  • Implemented Oracle Active Data Guard to replicate the new database for disaster recovery, to avoid possible loss of data
  • Partitioned data tables to enable multicategory data searches (for examples, fund records, codes, records by year) providing real-time fund reports 
  • Developed middleware and business intelligence applications within the in-house Oracle environment for flexible information flows between ANIMA and its depository banks for constant updates and validations of fund values for investor communications
  • Centralized control under one team, using Oracle Enterprise Manager
  • Installed two of Oracle’s Sun Fire X4270 M2 servers, running Oracle Database to ensure system high availability and business continuity by saving and managing fund data on a 24/7 basis 
  • Guaranteed rapid, fund-data recovery, achieving flashback functions that previously took one day in about one hour, within a 500 gigabyte database, avoiding any possible loss of data and saving updated fund information in case of emergency

Why Oracle

“ANIMA chose Oracle because of its flexibility and scalability—which the company required for its new infrastructure following its merger with Prima—as well as for the business continuity that only Oracle could provide for ANIMA’s technical, functional, and business requirements” said Cristiano Ziletti, application development manager, ANIMA SgR.

Implementation Process

ANIMA conducted an initial analysis of its IT architecture in December 2011, and went into production in May 2012. The implementation was in two main phases. The first phase—which took four months—analyzed system scalability, performance, and high availability. During this phase, the company also reorganized access control of users and structured and prepared fast recovery activities. In the second phase, ANIMA focused on business continuity by implementing a remote system to ensure production environment replication, centralized system management, and monitoring through the use of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Partner

D&T srl’s involvement in ANIMA’s Oracle implementation was valuable to the company. It began with the objective evaluation of the IT architecture and business needs analysis, and continued through to the actual implementation.

“D&T continues to support us, post production, to help us improve and refine our tools,” Ziletti said.

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