When Fidelity National Financial decided to revise its System i-based loan origination software, everything was on the table—including the operating platform. After considering Linux, Fidelity chose the Windows Server® environment for lower cost, more abundant resources, and more cost-effective scalability and high availability. Fidelity also gains greater business agility and integration options with Windows Server compared to System i.
Business Needs
The market for business and consumer loans in the United States is a market under turmoil. With very little bank expansion going on, loan origination and processing companies—such as Fidelity National Financial—don’t see much market growth. Almost any business they gain has to be a competitive win.
The Fidelity National Information Services division of the company entered this market in 2003 with loan origination software and services, which were hosted by Fidelity and accessed by lenders over the Internet, as a Web-based application. That application covered every aspect of the process from the loan application to the closing of the transaction. Fidelity’s software and services provided risk management for banks and built efficiencies into the loan process.
But the solution itself was not as efficient as possible. Built on the Series i platform, the software ran on relatively expensive AS/400 hardware. When the company decided in 2006 to renew and expand its market presence, it took that as a cue not only to rewrite its content engine, but also to fully evaluate its application, operating system, and hardware platform—from development environment through deployment.
“We wanted to be on the platform that would take us through the next generation of our solution,” says Ronny Chapman, General Manager, Originations, Fidelity Loan Origination. “We looked at everything: continuing on System i, and moving to Linux or to Windows Server.”
The company looked seriously at IBM SUSE Linux, creating a working prototype to analyze the development environment. It thought Linux would be compelling because of the perceived cost savings.
Solution
But when Fidelity looked at deploying a Linux-based version of its solution in its blade-based datacenter, the cost savings evaporated because of the paucity of low-cost support resources. “We couldn’t find much in the way of
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Did we gain agility by moving from System i to Windows Server? Absolutely. |
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Ronny Chapman
General Manager, Originations, Fidelity Loan Origination |
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skilled people and capabilities for operating Linux in a blade environment,” says Chapman.
That wasn’t true, however, when Fidelity considered running its loan origination software in a Windows Server®-based blade environment. “We had more resources available to us, and at lower cost, with Windows Server,” says Chapman. “We already had the trained people and the hardware, and going with Windows Server would eliminate the need to maintain a separate operating environment for one application.”
Fidelity was able to make its deployment decision “agnostically,” as Chapman puts it, because its original application had been written using the Visual LANSA development environment, which supports both the System i and Windows Server environments. Fidelity had chosen LANSA based on the speed of its development environment and its ease of use for relatively complex, large-scale enterprise applications.
It had used Visual LANSA to generate the RPG code needed for System i application logic and the HTML code needed for the Web-based presentation tier. Now, it used Visual LANSA to modernize the solution for Windows Server. Rather than merely porting the RPG code to a Windows runtime environment, Visual LANSA regenerated the RPG code as native C++ code to run on Windows Server. Visual LANSA’s data repository was used to move the DB2 database to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise Edition data management software for the Windows Server-based version of the Fidelity solution.
Benefits
Fidelity moved from System i to Windows Server looking for lower cost and a long-term platform. That’s what it got, and more.
Chapman estimates that running Fidelity loan origination software on Windows Server provides a 35 percent cost savings over Linux or System i versions of the solution. “The key metric I track is the cost of hardware per month per user,” he says. “With Windows Server, that number is less than $20 and declining each month. We couldn’t get near that with Linux or System i.”
Part of supporting Fidelity over the long term means supporting its anticipated growth in market share—and that means the technology has to be scalable. “Windows truly lets us scale based on market demand,” says Chapman. “We can scale out with a low-end server for $600 or scale up with a premium machine for $25,000. We can scale the expense to meet the revenue. We’re not locked into high-dollar Series i hardware.”
Lower-cost Windows Server hardware does more than enable greater scalability, according to Chapman. It also enables greater reliability. “It’s more affordable to create a high-availability environment with Windows than with System i or Linux, because the hardware is less expensive. That’s what we’ve done with our Windows environment and we’re really pleased with the reliability. In the year we’ve had this solution in production, we’ve had zero unplanned downtime due to the Windows hardware or software.”
The move to Windows Server has also increased the options available to Fidelity for integration with third-party services—such as credit agency reports—and expanded functionality within the application. For example, in addition to creating a new content engine, Fidelity updated its user interface with ASP.NET AJAX to speed screen refreshes and user interactivity. It also used prebuilt components—from reporting services to print drivers—instead of creating these components itself, speeding development and enabling Fidelity’s developers to focus on their area of greatest added value: the solution’s business logic.
“Because of the abundant ecosystem for Windows, we can concentrate on our core competency and outsource the rest,” says Chapman. “We’re not in the printer driver business—we’re in the financial services business. Running on Windows Server lets us do what we do best.”
