| QUICK VIEW |
Problem
Customer wanted to reduce resource requirements and minimize usage costs on Unisys platforms. A requirement was to enable the ‘offloading’ of various MIS reporting functions from the mainframe environment.
Solution
DATABridge for data replication, real-time updates, and support for anti-fraud initiatives
Results
- Reduced mainframe resource requirements and usage
- Cost-effective cloning of data
- Added security solution for anti-fraud efforts
- Achieved significant ROI
- Used with multiple relational databases (Oracle and SQL Server)
|
With a strategic focus on Ireland and its successful economy, the Irish Life & Permanent group http://www.irishlifepermanent.ie/ is a leading provider of personal financial services in the Irish market. Formed by the merger of Irish Life plc and Irish Permanent plc in 1999, the group has over one million customers in Ireland. Irish Life is the country’s largest leading life and pensions company, with a domestic market share of over 30%. Permanent TSB, formed following the acquisition of Trustee Savings Bank (TSB) in 2001, is the retail banking operation of the group and is the leading provider of residential mortgage finance in Ireland.
Paul Coakley started in 1991, and now leads the Unisys operations and technical support teams, as well as senior systems analysts for the retail banking operations of Permanent TSB. “Through several mergers, Irish Life & Permanent is a far bigger company with a larger scope of business than when I first started,” he said.
Searching for cost-efficiency through metered platforms
All Permanent TSB retail banking business is done on Unisys hosts. “When I joined in an operations role, the bank had just signed a Unisys deal,” Coakley said. When it was time to re-sign, Coakley looked at options for resource management, and learned about metered platforms. “In talking with people at UK banks, Unisys, and the world in general, we learned how metered platforms could provide cost savings.”
“Additionally, we needed a more cost-effective way to do data queries,” Coakley explained.
Coakley asked Unisys about solutions, and was told, in no uncertain terms, to go with Attachmate DATABridge. DATABridge is an all-in-one ETL (extract, load, transform) solution that integrates critical information for business intelligence (BI) analysis. It extracts and transforms MCP host data for improved decision support and data warehousing in real time.
DATABridge was the solution for the offloading of various MIS reporting functions from the mainframe environment. In a demo, Coakley was shown a table replicated to SQL Server with DATABridge. “I had never seen this before,” he said. “It looked good and we knew it would work.”
DATABridge co-developer makes onsite visit
DATABridge was co-developed by Joe Joseph, president of Joe Joseph & Associates Inc., which specializes in data management and co-operative distributed processing. Joseph visited onsite at Irish Life & Permanent as part of the Attachmate team. “Joe was anxious to see what we were doing,” explained Coakley. “We went through all the different uses, and it was a huge benefit for us to have him onsite. They were fantastic to us and in just a few days, saved us a month’s work,” he added. “We achieved our goals—and on target.”
It was important to enable end-users to see Business Objects, Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence, and also have user-friendly ways of querying data. Once the initial set-up was complete, incorporating DATABridge support into the day-to-day procedures now works very well. “We built many automated processes around our implementation, and the product pretty much looks after itself at this stage.”
DATABridge Enterprise Server replicates data even more cost-effectively
Implementation was very successful. “We had excellent support from Attachmate onsite and over the phone to help us through issues during the initial replication process,” Coakley noted.
Irish Life & Permanent also used DATABridge Enterprise Server, the component that offloads host processing to a Windows server, to get the data migrated to SQL. “Cloning the DMSII data cost-effectively was critical to us,” Coakley said. “And DATABridge Enterprise Server made the process much more efficient, cutting replication time from days to a matter of hours.”
The SQL environment now serves as the bank’s primary data store for all MIS/BIS reporting. “From a cost savings perspective, we expect savings of between €190K and €250K over the life of the Unisys metered license contract,” Coakley added. “DATABridge has been hugely successful in ensuring that our mainframe resource usage remains at a minimum,” said Coakley.
DATABridge enhances anti-fraud efforts with real-time feeds
Following the success of the initial DATABridge implementation, Irish Life & Permanent plans to go live with a further DATABridge project that involves real-time feeds from the DMSII environment, via SQL and IBM’s Websphere DataStage and DataMirror products, to an anti-money laundering/anti fraud package supplied by Norkom. “We are able to take sensitive data from DMSII, replicate it to the SQL environment, and with simple SQL scripting, send it to the Norkom front-end,” said Coakley. Without having to purchase new solutions or re-program, Irish Life & Permanent manages anti-fraud initiatives in real-time.
DATABridge plays a primary role in new Business Intelligence Competency Centre
Another new group-wide business initiative is the Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC). The company is in the process of implementing data replication from DMSII to Oracle to feed the BICC. Permanent TSB has three of the group’s 12 systems. “With DATABridge, we are currently the only business in the group doing real-time replication in the Competency Centre,” Coakley said.
According to Coakley, Oracle will host a ‘golden copy’ of each of the group’s critical business systems, with a view to generating new business opportunities and campaign management. This will also feed a new Predictive Analytics solution for Permanent TSB.
Leveraging DATABridge for improved decision support
Rather than writing applications to query against DMSII data, DATABridge has the capability to replicate that data to a relational database, so enterprises can use existing decision-making tools to make business information easily accessible for the purpose of analyzing and processing while simultaneously conserving host resources.
Since putting DATABridge solutions to work, Irish Life & Permanent has seen savings from five to ten MIPS per month, and has also improved the run time on existing MIS reporting. In an environment where Unisys resources need to be kept at their minimum, DATABridge is key. “There are many efficiencies, and good news regarding the business and bank from the group,” said Coakley. “Attachmate provided us with extremely good customer service,” he concluded. “We turned everything around in two weeks—it was just unbelievable.”