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Case Study

China Merchants Securities (HK) Uses VMware to Accelerate Administration and Investment Banking Services

China Merchants Securities (HK) implemented a virtual desktop infrastructure to cut costs, improve data security and reduce its IT management load. Administration employees can now access their desktops from any location, while the IT team can now provision new desktops in 15 minutes, recover lost data within 30 minutes if a PC crashes, and manage all user environments from a central location.

Parent company China Merchants Securities is one of the top 10 integrated securities firms in China. Listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2009, the firm has led the domestic securities industry with its robust performance, international business platform, and extensive branch network that reaches 50 top-tier cities throughout the country.

In 2005, China Merchants Securities acquired CM-CCS Securities Ltd in Hong Kong, which now operates as China Merchants Securities (HK). The Hong Kong business currently has about 300 employees.

The Challenge

China Merchants Securities (HK)’s core business is helping clients make investment decisions and execute trades in futures and securities markets. To operate successfully, the firm must provide efficient, responsive administration for brokers and traders who advise and take orders from clients. The securities house also provides expert complementary financial services such as investment banking, asset management, and securities research and analysis. To meet its objectives, the business must provide employees with secure, easily managed, low-cost desktops to carry out functions such as human resources, compliance, operations, administration, IT and investment banking.

However, in 2010, China Merchants Securities (HK)’s IT environment was not fulfilling those requirements. Important corporate information residing on individual desktops was vulnerable to hard disk crashes or malware that made it past the company’s defenses. Managing individual desktops was time consuming and kept IT team members away from projects that could add value to the business. For example, it took the technology team up to two hours to set up a desktop PC for each new employee, while an administrator would dedicate up to half a day recovering data and applications if a PC crashed. This meant the firm could not meet its objective of dedicating only two IT team members to desktop administration tasks.

In addition, employees had no access to their desktop information and applications once they left the office, limiting their ability to respond to events occurring outside business hours. Only the IT team could log in remotely using the company’s virtual private network.

China Merchants Securities (HK)’s first step to resolve these issues was to engage VMware partner Macroview Telecom to develop a plan for a new desktop environment.

Macroview Telecom was already supporting the firm’s networking, security and remote access equipment, and was well-skilled in virtualization projects. This combination of expertise and understanding of China Merchants Securities (HK)’s needs proved a compelling proposition for the securities firm.

The Macroview Telecom plan established three objectives:

• support a new desktop environment with appropriate service level agreements
• extend existing business continuity plans to the desktop, ideally by running desktop applications and data from the datacenter rather than on end-user devices
• centralize processing and memory resources in the datacenter, enabling administrators to allocate them to users as needed.