Merrill Lynch Gets A Handle On Its Assets

Merrill Lynch & Co. is gathering bits of information it collects on hardware, software, and data into a single location, helping it pinpoint underused assets in its sprawling inventory.

The repository has let the financial-services company monitor compliance with software licenses keyed to the number of concurrent users. It's freed up chunks of tape and disk storage and pointed out opportunities for more savings, such as combining single- and dual-processor servers into four-processor servers. It's also reduced the possibility that a server or storage-unit failure can bring down the entire network. "We can answer questions like, 'What happens if this server goes down?' " says VP and data architect Howard Goldberg. During this year's SQL Slammer virus outbreak, the company was able to quickly detect machines running Microsoft's SQL Server and shut down any deemed susceptible to attack.

The early stages of the inventory project, in place since last year, focused on tracking hardware assets, first mainframes and then servers, desktops, PDAs, and network devices. The idea was to bring the methodology used for managing data centers to bear on the problem of managing distributed systems. "We needed to start treating our distributed environment as a logical data center," Goldberg says.

With hardware assets now inventoried, the company is turning to software assets, beginning with major applications from vendors such as Siebel Systems Inc., and then server and desktop applications. "We've tackled the hardware layer," says Joe Pomerantz, Merrill's first VP of data management and distributed services. "Now we're into the software. Then we'll focus on the underlying data."

In casting about for solutions, Merrill execs hit on the idea of reusing components of a data warehouse that had been built for the business area, including Hummingbird Inc.'s BI Web business-intelligence software, Cognos Corp.'s Cubes analytic software, and MyReports, an in-house developed query-scheduling system. "This was just another data-warehousing problem," Goldberg says. "We used the same infrastructure for the business warehouse for our technology warehouse."

The repository holds information collected by Tangram Enterprise Solutions Inc.'s Asset Insight autodiscovery software, which tracks software usage, serial numbers, location, and other statistics, and NetIQ Corp.'s AppManager, which analyzes performance and availability of Windows- and Unix-based systems and applications. IBM's Information Integrator data-management software gathers the information into a single location. Says Pomerantz, "We're leveraging the asset-management and systems-management tools we already have."