Case Studies: Financial Services

PREMIER Bankcard, LLC (PREMIER) one of the largest VISA and MasterCard credit providers in the United States, needed to enhance scalability and performance for its business intelligence (BI) data warehouse and online transaction processing (OLTP) databases. “BI began as an area of research for us, but has become absolutely mission critical,” says Dan Zerfas, Vice President of Software Development at PREMIER. The company enhanced its BI infrastructure by upgrading its 10-terabyte data warehouse to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), hosted on a server computer with 16 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. PREMIER also upgraded its 1.5-terabyte OLTP database to the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005. The upgraded deployments provide a better view of the business, enterprise-grade scalability, maintenance without scheduled downtime, and easier database management.

The Life Division of Pacific Life Insurance Company had a strong dependency between its business and information technology (IT) workers. The executives, business analysts, finance personnel, and customer service representatives who rely on corporate data to do their jobs had to frequently employ IT specialists to help access the desired data and put it into meaningful reports. The process was slow for business users and exceptionally time-consuming for the IT staff. To enable its business groups to be more self-sufficient and free its IT personnel from constantly creating business reports, Pacific Life deployed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition with Business Intelligence features. The new solution has helped the company’s Life Division standardize its data infrastructure, ease data access and business reporting, improve business and IT efficiency, and reduce costs.

"By adding DSP to the Microsoft BI stack we were able to customize Web Parts . . . giving our employees in-depth information and key metrics, making it possible for them to directly act on the information now available." Lei Fu Vice President of Business Applications

Raymond James Financial needed to replace a data management solution that wasn’t keeping pace with the company’s rapid growth, including the planned deployment of 64-bit data warehouse applications for business intelligence. The company’s solution: the CommVault data backup and recovery solution running on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system software. By centralizing and automating the data management environment at Raymond James, the solution has made data backups 25 percent faster, data restorations 75 percent faster, and the entire process easier and more reliable. The changes made the company more productive, saving time and money. Technicians have more time to troubleshoot servers, follow up on exceptions to backup reports, and perform restores that would otherwise wait until the next day—further increasing reliability and availability.