|  | | | Airways New Zealand - Team Tools Help Developers Upgrade Mission-Critical Aviation Software | | Airways New Zealand provides important products and services for its home country's aviation system as well as for customers abroad. A client request to update and add features to a key software product called the Staff Utilization Management System (SUMS), which is used to manage air traffic control staffing, led Airways New Zealand to reconsider the tools used in its development shop. The result was that it moved most of its development efforts to Microsoft® .NET technologies. The company adopted Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and used Visual Studio Team System to upgrade and enhance its SUMS software. Now the company's development group can more closely monitor specific development tasks while improving the overall quality of code through better documentation and more frequent quality checks during builds. | | | Jack Henry & Associates Banking Software Vendor Enhances Product Appeal with Service-Oriented Approach | | Jack Henry & Associates (JHA) is a leading provider of core systems and related applications for banks and credit unions across the United States. The company serves 7,000 customers and employs about 3,000 people. To expand its presence in mid-sized financial institutions and make its product line integrate more effectively in large banks, JHA launched its jXchange initiative with help from Geniant, an expert in service-oriented architecture. The multiphase project uses Microsoft .NET technology to provide Web services and other technologies that help JHA products integrate more efficiently into existing systems and provide a more compelling product set for new customers. (case study and business article). Read on >> | | | International Bank of Taipei Automates Foreign-Exchange Services, Opens New Markets | | The International Bank of Taipei (IBT) offers foreign exchange services to individuals and organisations. The Taiwan Central Bank limits such transactions to NT$500,000 (New Taiwan dollars) per day and requires that exchange transactions be made in person at a bank branch. In early 2004, the Central Bank directed all institutions offering foreign exchange to connect to its network and make limit inquiries and record transactions in real time. The International Bank of Taipei used Microsoft Host Integration Server 2004 to quickly connect its mainframe system to the Central Bank, and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Orchestration Services to transform the schemas of incoming and outgoing transactions. Now, foreign exchange requests can be completed online in seconds. As a result, IBT has increased the efficiency of its staff, improved customer satisfaction, and opened up potential new markets. Read on >> | | | Capital IQ (a Division of Standard & Poor's) Picks Windows over UNIX, Cuts Cost by 75 Percent, Ensures Growth | | Capital IQ needed to develop its financial information-services platform quickly and cost-effectively to attract first-round investor financing. It rejected Sun and Oracle as too costly and time-consuming. Instead, it built its platform - and its business - on Microsoft Windows Server System. The result is a highly sophisticated Web-based solution that includes Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 plug-ins so that customers can take advantage of Capital IQ information directly in the desktop software they already use. Choosing Windows Server System has saved the company millions of dollars in development and scalability expenses over the past six years. Microsoft technologies enable the company to issue updates more quickly than its competitors, to organise its development program more effectively, and ensure growth for years to come. Read on >> |
| |  | | | Westdeutsche ImmobilienBank Optimised Workflow Has Multiplied Loan Decision Throughput | | As one of the first German banks, the Westdeutsche ImmobilienBank (WIB) in Mainz has based its risk assessment for real estate loans completely on Microsoft .NET technology. In this way, the bank was able to streamline the entire application process. This now spans from the point of sale to the back-office systems. All relevant information, such as economic background data, real estate ratings, and application data from various partner companies, is provided online via the Internet. Because the software automatically sorts out all futile requests for loans in the run-up to decision-making, the throughput has multiplied. Moreover, the average processing time for each loan application has been reduced significantly thanks to the online availability of all needed information. Best of all, the new workflow is absolutely audit-proof and meets all legal requirements of the new European bank framework, Basel II. Read on >> | | | Chicago Mercantile Exchange Application Speeds Auditing Functions | | The Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME) is the largest futures exchange in the United States, trading over a record 4.4 million contracts per day in the second quarter of 2005, up 33 percent from the same period a year ago, via CME® Globex®, its electronic trading platform, and the trading floor. The exchange needed to improve its member firm financial statement auditing application, which was written in Microsoft Visual Basic version 6.0. After evaluating and rejecting J2EE, CME decided to implement the new auditing and tracking application as a Microsoft Windows Forms application with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The choice of Visual Basic .NET helped utilise the developers' knowledge of Visual Basic. By using the COM Interop feature of the Microsoft .NET Framework, CME was able to use existing libraries. The new application is more capable, maintainable and responsive than the application it replaced. Read on >> | | | Amegy Bank New Payment-Processing Service Increases Customer Options, Reduces Maintenance | | Using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework, the bank built a new payment-processing solution in 90 days that requires no developer effort for each new customer. The solution integrates programmatically with customers' e-commerce sites, enabling those customers to keep consumers on their own sites throughout the shopping experience. In addition to freeing bank developers from having to set up new customers, the new solution decreases the time for the bank to bring new customers online - from months to minutes - and delivers improved security, performance and reliability. Read on >> | |
|  | | | Chubb Insurance of Canada Cuts Costs and Boosts Productivity with Solution Based on Microsoft .NET Technology | | Chubb Insurance Company of Canada (Chubb Canada) specialises in high-end personal insurance, such as homes, cars, large watercraft, and excess liability policies. The company services 45,000 personal insurance customers through 250 independent brokers located in five provinces. To streamline business processes and improve communications with brokers and customers, and to encourage wider adoption of the site among brokers, Chubb Canada enhanced functionalities and introduced a new billing feature. Leveraging Microsoft .NET technology, Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Chubb Canada launched a new application to help improve the way it works with third-party appraisal companies. These initiatives have helped the organisation to realise a number of additional benefits. Read on >> | | | Insurance Center of The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company Consolidates Applications on 64-Bit Technology, Boosts Performance | | The Insurance Center of The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company ("MEGA") provides health insurance to self-employed individuals. After three years of strong growth, the Insurance Center applications couldn't keep up with the increasing number of policies and claims: Performance was dropping while maintenance times and costs increased. The Insurance Center wanted to increase its capacity yet consolidate the number of servers needing support. To that end, the company migrated its key applications to 64-bit hardware and software: Unisys ES7000 servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems. With this solution, the Insurance Center consolidated 20 servers onto four server clusters, increased application performance 43 percent, improved system availability, reduced maintenance time by 100 days, and cut hardware costs. Read on >> |
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