Enterprise, Trade and Investment Minister Arlene Foster today (15 April 2014) officially opened the Enterprise Command Centre for Northern Ireland's largest IT company, Allstate Northern Ireland at the Belfast office.
The state-of-the-art Enterprise Command Centre will provide around-the-clock monitoring of key applications and a rapid response to any service interruption for its parent company, The Allstate Corporation - the largest publicly held personal lines property and casualty insurer in America. This level of investment reflects how highly the Allstate Northern Ireland operation is regarded in providing high-quality software development services and high-end business solutions in support of its US parent's operations.
Highly sophisticated incident management and facilitation processes, coupled with the innovative use of new and emerging technology in this new Command Centre, will allow Allstate NI's highly skilled analysts and engineers a broad and deep view of Allstate's enterprise IT environment and enable them to facilitate and respond to the most critical of situations.
Enterprise, Trade and Investment Minister Arlene Foster said:
"The opening of Allstate's new state-of-the-art Command Centre marks an important development for the company, which is one of our biggest employers. Allstate's continued investment in Northern Ireland is a strong endorsement of our local talent pool and knowledge infrastructure and this new facility will ensure it continues to provide a world class service to its customers."
The Enterprise Operations Command Centre will comprise of Incident Monitoring, Workload Management, Security Operations, and Network Operations functions. It will support over 200 enterprise applications for the Allstate Corporation.
At the core of the new environment is a 40' x 8' video display wall. Employing cutting edge technology, the display wall is fed from 22 separate video signals outputting over 20 template-based display wall layouts. Satellite feeds provide real-time views of global news and weather. Video conferencing lies at the heart of Allstate's multisite collaboration capability, allowing for international support as required.
Bro McFerran, Managing Director, Allstate Northern Ireland said:
"Allstate Northern Ireland has had a strong presence here since 1998, and working closely with Invest NI, we have grown to employ over 2,200 people across our three sites. We are delighted to offer our employees a work environment based on industry best practice, using best of breed technologies. The Command Centre heralds an unparalleled level of awareness, operational support and collaboration across the Allstate Enterprise from the United States to Northern Ireland and India."
