"Banking is an industry where mergers and acquisitions are a constant occurrence. A major hurdle in merging two financial institutions is getting a full understanding of the newly combined environment. The single-directory functionality and interoperability of the Windows 2000 Active Directory service will help minimize administration redundancy within our company."
--Dustin Sauter, enterprise systems engineer, Wells Fargo Services Company
Company Profile
Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgages, and consumer finance through almost 6,000 stores, a Web site, and other distribution channels across North America and elsewhere. In business since 1852, Wells Fargo has its corporate headquarters in San Francisco. With $205 billion in assets, it the seventh-largest bank in the United States.
Wells Fargo is a highly decentralized financial services company that is the product of more than 1,500 mergers in 147 years. The most recent, with Norwest Corporation, makes Wells Fargo the premier banking franchise west of the Mississippi River. To meet the diverse IT challenges it faces, Wells Fargo is migrating its Microsoft® Windows NT® Server 4.0 infrastructure to the Windows® 2000 operating system.
Within Wells Fargo & Company, the Wells Fargo Services Company performs the central information technology (IT) function, handling all the back-end and infrastructure decisions for the company. To relieve growing IT administrative challenges, Wells Fargo is planning to migrate the 60,000 employees who currently use Windows NT Workstation to Windows 2000 Professional, starting in April 2000. The 40,000 other Wells Fargo employees who currently use computer terminals in the bank’s branch offices are expected to adopt Windows 2000.
Active Directory Consolidates Domains
For an organization as big and geographically dispersed as Wells Fargo, IT management is a huge issue. Certain capacity and performance limitations of Windows NT 4.0 were overburdening IT resources, a fact acknowledged by employees at all levels. In particular, the restriction on the size of NT domains (IT management units) was hampering efficiency and incurring significant costs in IT equipment and services. The Microsoft Windows 2000 Active DirectoryTM service will allow Wells Fargo to combine numerous small Windows NT domains into one large Windows 2000 domain. The service feature also provides a tool, IntelliMirror, that will enable users to deploy Windows 2000 Professional more quickly and efficiently. This is central to the bank's desire to enable technology to drive greater end-user functionality and performance while maintaining a highly manageable enterprise environment.
"Consolidating domains under Active Directory will abolish many of the supporting functions we currently have to undertake, such as trust administration," said Dustin Sauter, Enterprise Systems Engineer, Wells Fargo Services Company. "And a single Active Directory database can scale much more than a Windows NT database. It's easier to find and manage information when it's all in one place."
Supporting a World of Mergers and Change
Wells Fargo also expects Windows 2000 to reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT, especially once it deploys the new operating system at the client level. The Active Directory mobile logon capabilities will enable Wells Fargo users to travel from one city or state to another, replicating their environments and accessing files easily in their new locations.
The branches and business units that are not part of the centralized IT organization will experience lower TCO through Windows 2000, too, by loading more services on fewer servers. "Cost ownership calculations based on beta code are risky, but we know intuitively that Windows 2000 will save us money and make us more efficient," said Sauter.
Software and Services
Exchange Server 5.5
Office
Systems Management
Server 2.0
Windows 2000 Server
with Internet Information Services
(IIS) 5.0
Windows NT Workstation
For More Information
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