Cegal secures uptime and stability for KLP Kapitalforvaltning's critical business systems
Downtime is out of the question for KLP Kapitalforvaltning's critical business systems. With Cegal as an IT partner, KLP Kapitalforvaltning is secure that the most important system works today, tomorrow and in the future.
Arthur Olav Meberg, Director ICT Operations at KLP, starts with saying: “KLP's capital management environment is one of the largest management environments in Norway. It is absolutely essential that our most important business application, SimCorp Dimension, is stable.”
KLP (Kommunal Landspensjonskasse) is Norway's largest pension company. KLP was formed in 1949 to provide occupational pensions for local government employees. KLP Kapitalforvaltning is a wholly-owned subsidiary of KLP. The company manages funds on behalf of the companies in the KLP group and other customers through the KLP funds. The company currently manages almost NOK 700 billion.
ICT Director Arthur Olav Meberg and Tore Hjorth, IT manager at KLP Kapitalforvaltning, saw that capacity and expertise related to the management and operation of SimCorp Dimension had to be increased. Cegal was selected as a technology partner together with a team from SimCorp.
Meberg says that an important reason was to reduce risk; to gain the security that SimCorp Dimension continued to be stable and without downtime. A central part of the application is Oracle databases with hardware and software from Oracle (ODA - Oracle Database Appliance High Availability). The machine uses the Linux operating system, and Cegal is responsible for this working at all times.
"Cegal gives us security"
The agreement with Cegal has given us peace of mind that we have an application that works today, tomorrow and beyond. The Oracle database at the bottom is always updated, and Cegal ensures that data is copied in real time to a disaster recovery location.
Tore Hjorth, KLP Kapitalforvaltning
KLP Kapitalforvaltning has received new hardware, a stable operating system and updated Oracle software as part of the delivery.
ICT director Arthur Olav Meberg adds: “Even though KLP does not save operating costs from these changes in isolation, we sleep well at night and have the security that we are taken care of.”
The SimCorp Dimension solution is run in KLP's own data centre.
With Cegal as an IT partner, we have a very stable business system and have predictable costs related to the operation, maintenance, and updating of the platform.
Arthur Olav Meberg, KLP Kapitalforvaltning
Meberg continues: "Cegal is small enough for us to get the attention we need, and the Cegal consultants have outstanding expertise, particularly related to Oracle and Linux."
KLPs users are happy
ICT Director Meberg adds that the users in the administrative environment and KLP's IT department are very satisfied.
“It is always a good sign when both IT and the business are satisfied with the technology and the IT delivery,” Meberg continues.
His colleague Tore Hjorth adds: “We started collaborating with Cegal just before the pandemic hit us. I am delighted that Cegal, in collaboration with operational resources from SimCorp, has ensured good monitoring of the system and quick response in the event of problems. In a difficult time, it was good to have available and capable supporters around. I feel confident that we are in good hands with the current setup before we eventually move the service to a cloud-based operating model.”
Jesper Norman Hjorth, Senior Managing Consultant at Cegal, has worked closely with KLP Kapitalforvaltning. He says that Cegal has assisted the large administrative environment in several areas, particularly related to Oracle technology and application operation.
Norman Hjorth says: “Among other things, we have optimized the Oracle environment and got the correct Oracle licensing in place, established an effective backup regime to ensure restore with minimal time consumption and ditto loss of data, as well as tuned the databases so that the environment doesn’t use unnecessary resources. By monitoring the solution, we can also find potential errors and correct them before the application stops.”
KLP (Kommunal Landpensjonskasse) was created to give municipal employees a pension scheme they could not otherwise get - a scheme that would secure their old age. KLP was started as a joint venture of several small municipalities. Today, KLP is Norway's largest pension company and handles pension agreements for 349 municipalities, 30 healthcare providers and 2,200 companies.
