Kaufmännische Krankenkasse (KKH) is a health insurance company serving 1.9 million customers through its 114 customer service centers which cover all 16 federal states of Germany. KKH relies on competitive prices and excellent service to attract and retain customers, but as the health insurance market is heavily regulated, operational cost savings are critical to the profitability of the company.

When KKH saw the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its PCs and server (excluding their Unix and Mainframe servers) systems soaring due to aging legacy hardware, the company seized the opportunity to consolidate a majority of their older systems onto Intel® architecture-based platforms to reduce costs, improve resource manageability and security and deliver high return on investment (ROI).

The company asked Intel® Solution Services to formulate a data center cost reduction strategy to support its business and technical requirements. KKH selected Intel Solution Services because their vendor-neutral approach ensured KKH benefited from industry independent advice. Additionally selection considerations included their extensive business expertise in dealing with enterprise IT challenges, their results-driven working model and their ability to develop solutions that deliver clear ROI.

Understanding the Customer’s needs

The first task for the consultants working on this project with KKH was a thorough assessment of the existing PC and server systems to gather concrete technical and economic information to help them have a comprehensive understanding of the demands on KKH’s servers and identify consolidation opportunities. The consultants gathered data through interviews with KKH's IT department and by installing data-collector agents on KKH's servers.

Intel Solution Services used BMC Software's Enterprise Performance Assurance* (EPA) solution to gather and analyze the data, create server utilisation and response time models, simulate the effects of contemplated architectural changes and evaluate the cost-savings opportunities offered by a consolidated platform.