Riverbed® Steelhead® Products Enable IT
Consolidation at Global Insurance Company
Willis Group Holdings Limited (www.willis.com) is a leading global
insurance broker, delivering professional insurance, reinsurance, risk
management, financial and human resource consulting, and actuarial
services to institutions around the world. Willis has more than 300 offices
in 100 countries, with a global team of approximately 16,000 employees serving clients in 190
countries. Willis is publicly traded (NYSE: WSH) and generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2007.
Challenge: Costly IT Infrastructure and Limited Global Access to Information
Willis had grown organically and through acquisitions, which resulted in a distributed IT network
running many applications, often with significant overlap. Some of these applications, such as
Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange, were housed in the company’s two main data centers,
as well as a number of international locations. Other applications, such as a web-based human
resources application, were centralized and accessed globally from one data center.
This complex environment created a few challenges for Willis. First, employees around the world had
difficulty accessing the centralized applications, particularly from locations with limited IT infra-
structure. This translated into a lack of key business information for many employees. “The insur-
ance world is all about information, and a significant challenge of our business is getting access to
information quickly and efficiently,” said Eoghan Doyle, director of infrastructure and Operations. “A
broker who’s based in Indonesia may be working with colleagues in London, New York, and various
other locations where expertise resides in the company. Getting access to that information can be
difficult, particularly from locations that have limited IT infrastructure.”
In addition, the distributed IT environment was
expensive to maintain. “Each major office or
region had its own mail server,” said Doyle. “We
wanted t