ACI Specialty Benefits accelerates business growth

"One of the reasons behind our growth and success as a leading national provider of employee assistance programs is technology," said Erin Krehbiel, president, ACI Specialty Benefits. "VMware provides us with agility to compete effectively with larger competitors and the ability to accommodate up to 5,000 new customers in an hour while continuing to deliver an exceptional customer experience. With VMware vSphere with Operations Management, we get better insights about where we are today and where we want to be in the future."

Intelligent Operations Management Enables the Company to be Proactive
Founded in 1983, ACI is a provider of EAPs, workplace wellness, student assistance, concierge, and work/life services to corporations worldwide. The San Diego, Calif.-based company's services span mental and behavioral health support, financial and legal consultations, child and elder care referrals, and assistance with travel, entertainment, and gifts, among other personal services. According to ACI, it provides services in 28 countries--covering more than seven million lives worldwide--and it expects to expand its services to 35 countries by the end of 2015.

New partnerships, expansion into more countries and the introduction of new services such as its student assistance program are fueling the company's hyper growth. To support the continued demand for its services while gaining visibility into IT resource utilization and capacity management, ACI deployed VMware vSphere with Operations Management, which helps customers optimize the performance, capacity and configuration health of their VMware vSphere environments.
Prior to using vSphere with Operations Management, ACI was challenged by a lack of visibility into the capacity of its virtual environment and related resources requiring frequent, additional investments in hardware to keep pace with demand. vSphere with Operations Management puts ACI in the driver's seat with insight into capacity utilization, the ability to calculate how onboarding new customers impacts capacity, and the ability to forecast future IT needs. ACI's IT staff now relies on a comprehensive operations dashboard from vSphere with Operations Management to proactively monitor the performance, capacity and health of their virtual environment, and head off emerging IT issues before they impact users.

Since upgrading to VMware vSphere with Operations Management from VMware vSphere, ACI's CIO Ryan Fay reports that it has achieved the following additional benefits:
Decreased its hardware footprint resulting in 20 percent savings in capital expenditures (CAPEX)
Increased consolidation ratios by 50 percent
Decreased the time spent integrating backend systems by 35 percent
Decreased the time spent on diagnostics and problem resolution by 25 percent
Increased web site performance by 55 percent
Achieved 100 percent application and web site uptime
ACI has also virtualized business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and MongoDB, among others, to take advantage of increased agility, availability and efficiency.