SYDNEY, January 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- FireScope, a leading developer of Business Service Management solutions, announced today that Suncorp, one of Australia's largest diversified financial services groups, is now utilizing FireScope Unify(TM) to manage IT operations to ensure optimal business outcomes.

The group, which serves over 9 million insurance and banking customers, was facing a challenge that impacts many CIO's today: How to scale IT infrastructure to satisfy increasing demand, without impacting customer experience?

An early initiative to deliver management dashboards for Guidewire, Suncorp's platform for managing insurance claims, using legacy monitoring tools found scope for improvement. As a result, Suncorp partnered with FireScope to deploy its Unify(TM) solution and delivered a single business service view in less than 5 days of starting the Proof Of Concept by leveraging and augmenting legacy monitoring tools.

"Suncorp now manages its entire Guidewire ClaimCenter environment - including storage, servers and applications - using FireScope. This approach gives Suncorp a 'Business Services View', which is a single view of all performance metrics and issues that provides it with a clear management advantage," said Jeff Smith, CEO Suncorp Business Services.

Suncorp has now identified over 200 business critical services to be managed by FireScope Unify(TM).

"More than ever before, executives realize the competitive advantage of tightly aligning IT with business outcomes," said Peter Molloy, VP Australia & New Zealand of FireScope. "FireScope discovers and monitors the relationships of IT services to the customers receiving them, by type, quality and business impact. I see many trying to get that outcome, but I'm yet to see others delivering on the promise in a timely or cost effective manner."

More information, including an executive briefing that details FireScope's approach to managing the Guidewire Insurance Suite can be found at http://www.firescope.com/Solutions/Guidewire/.