How Kemp Virtual Load Balancer Boosted Balmain’s Business

Challenge

Headquartered in Sydney, Balmain is Australia’s most prominent non-bank commercial loan manager. The 40 plus-year-old financial organization has $5B in assets under management across a wide range of customers, including major corporations and small and medium businesses. Being a large financial services organization with an equally large customer base, Balmain required a load balancing solution for its servers and data centers. The backbone of its technology is built with a mix of private, public and hybrid cloud. While this proved to leverage business for several years, Balmain began experiencing issues, including crawling IT performance speed, inability to consolidate their customer base’s application assets and general capacity problems with its cloud, all of which it’s at-the-time load balancing solution lacked the ability to accomplish.

“We were not satisfied with the quality of the existing solution and sought an enterprise-grade solution that could handle the load and accommodate our business growth,” said Vik Sharma, Head of Information Technology at Balmain. “We wanted a solution that could amalgamate multiple systems, including new businesses, into a new load balancer setup.”

Solution

Sharma and their team researched, assessed the capabilities of Kemp® Virtual LoadMaster® Load Balancer and found it to be the ideal solution. One of the product’s key abilities permitted Balmain’s infrastructure, which included its cloud storage along with Microsoft Exchange, IIS, SharePoint Web Services, APIs and mobile apps, to scale up without sustaining any extra data costs.

When the organization’s IT team began deploying LoadMaster, the six servers were able to be merged under one location, which helped the team observe server and data center performance in a much simpler way.

Balmain’s expertise in the IT space allowed for a seamless deployment and implementation of Kemp’s product, along with bringing down application delivery to 20% of its previous solution. 

Results

The performance of Balmain’s six servers expanded to have a 99.9% reliability rate and the overall speed boosted by an impressive 200%, which had not been seen by the organization before.

Balmain successfully launched its first mobile app on both Android and iOS devices, enabling its customers to conveniently pick and choose which loans and mortgages they would like to work with and, what Balmain believes is a first in its industry, the ability to see loan portfolios right on their phones.

Balmain’s utilization of LoadMaster has enabled the IT department to continue its work without having to worry about any overcapacity issues.

“The additional heavy workload will incur no additional cost, as Kemp’s LoadMasters don’t care if they handle 10 or 100 servers,” said Sharma.

About Balmain

Balmain is a broad based financial services organisation, with activities spanning commercial mortgage finance (both arranging and lending) and investment funds management. Our skilled people and unique ability to access wholesale institutional funds, bank balance sheets, retail funds management and private markets both locally and overseas has enabled Balmain to provide a funding experience which cannot be matched.