Bas Van Wijngaarden,Senior Technical Application Manager
KAS Bank
KAS Bank N.V. is a European Specialist in wholesale securities services. They are responsible to connect financial institutions, both within Europe and across the world. KAS Bank offers value-added services to organizations (both national and international) that are active in the pensions and securities industries.
KAS BANK was founded in 1806. With offices across Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt am Main, they serve more than 90 markets with a total of 700 employees.
KAS Bank, a European based specialist for the safekeeping and administration of securities and high-end risk and reporting services, was bound by the legislations of their national bank. As a result, they were forced not to use the BizTalk Admin Console as the users had administrator rights to the BizTalk server (in production). They wanted to have restricted access to the users accessing the production system. They turned to BizTalk360 to take advantage of the in-built fine grained security mechanism of the product and to try out other features of the product.
KAS Bank had a complex environment setup with 5 BizTalk Servers and almost 100 applications. Due to their legislative requirements of not allowing users to have access to the BizTalk Admin Console, KAS Bank decided to make use of BizTalk360 for their administrative and monitoring requirements. They purchased BizTalk360 in July 2012 and have been using it till date. KAS Bank use BizTalk360 to manage their Production and UAT environments.
The team at KAS Bank often face the need to search for the location of specific files and the configuration information. With the traditional administration console, the users did not have the capability to search for some specific information. With BizTalk360, the Search Functionality is a life saver for the team and they use it on a daily basis (to search for a specific URL where specific files are located / ports / configuration, and so on). Say, for instance, the user knows the process involved but do not know the location of the file; in this case, they can use the Search functionality to look for the port names and then find the location of the files that they require. This feature has saved a lot of time for the team.
Similarly, the developers had to often reach out to the administrators to check any specific details in the production environment. The User Access Policy feature of BizTalk360 has really helped the KAS Bank team as standard users no longer need to contact administrators to check for any specific details in the environment for which they do not have access. The restricted access functionality allows administrators to grant user access to specific areas in the production environment but not perform any critical operations (such as Stop / Terminate / Delete).
KAS Bank chooses BizTalk360 in accordance to legislative demands of their national bank and to effectively utilize the time spent on daily tasks
-Bas Van Wijngaarden, Senior Technical Application Manager
KAS Bank
In addition to Search functionality and User Access Policy features, the team at KAS Bank use the Monitoring capabilities of BizTalk360 and the Advanced Event Viewer extensively during their daily routine. In addition, the development team also uses the Business Rules Engine (BRE) feature quite often to know what rules are currently in use in the production environment for testing purposes (with restricted access privileges). The team also uses BizTalk360 to look into the configuration of their applications.
We asked few questions to the Bas Van Wjingaarden, Senior Technical Application Manager at KAS Bank. This is what he had to say about their experience with BizTalk360:
Over the last 3 years, there has been lots of development in the product with new features. The Support team is great; they try to answer all the questions and issues quickly. Whenever we have a question w.r.t. a new feature, it gets picked up and if it’s a genuine case, the feature is developed and released. Otherwise, we get an explanation as to why they can’t pick it up as a new feature case, which is great!
BizTalk360 is very intuitive and you know exactly where to find what you need! The team at BizTalk360 have balanced the design wonderfully between leaving the features in and still making the UI as minimal as possible.
-Bas Van Wijngaarden, Senior Technical Application Manager
KAS Bank
“Very Good! “
“Good. We still use the normal BizTalk Admin Console mostly for our operations, but BizTalk360 has improved our day-to-day operations with the nifty features that are available.”
“Very Good. Saravana Kumar gave an online demo for our development team that covered the quick overview of all the features in the product. We were quite impressed with the demo that helped us with the decision making process.”
“Very Good. We were easily able to download the product and get the licenses from BizTalk360. The process was very quick.”
“Very Good. In the earlier versions, we had some trouble with the upgrade process. The team helped me fix the issues and get it working. However, the last few upgrades were just like clicking Next…, Next…, and we were into the latest version of the product”
“Very good. For us, the HTML5 version is much better than the Silverlight version”
“Very good. Whenever I have an issue, I first search for a solution on the support website. Most of the occasions, I am able to find an answer to my questions. When I can’t, I send a support ticket and I get a fast response from the support team with the link to the article. The support portal is maturing as well with the articles.”