Case Studies: Financial Services

Ensuring that monetary transactions go smoothly between banks, financial services firms, and the federal government is a mission-critical responsibility for the Banco Central de Costa Rica (BCCR). For several years, the technology platform that the BCCR used for these tasks ran on a system using 32-bit hardware and software. To improve the overall performance of the system and to prepare for future growth, the BCCR decided to migrate its database servers to a pure 64-bit computing platform that runs on Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition operating system and the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 database. The software, combined with new 64-bit IBM server hardware, is helping the bank improve the performance of financial transactions, increase the reliability of the system, and attain scalability that will enable the transaction system to grow with future demand and new financial services.

Vital Forsikring ASA, part of DnB NOR ASA, is Norway’s largest privately owned provider of pension and life insurance. Soon-to-be-implemented pension laws in Norway are expected to increase the number of new pension insurance subscribers. Anticipating the new legislation to take effect in January 2006, Vital wanted to be ready with convenient ways for customers to access its expanding pension product offerings. By using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and SQL Server™ 2005, programmers delivered a feature-rich pension application that provides better scalability and performance. Developers enjoyed increased productivity, and Vital is poised to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of new individual and corporate pension insurance subscribers with a reliable, cost-effective solution.

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.

Guidant Financial Group has quickly grown from its original three cofounders to more than 50 employees in three U.S. locations. To prepare for continued growth, the company upgraded its equipment and streamlined its services with Windows® XP Professional x64-Bit Edition, Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 Standard x64 Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 (64-bit). The new solution provides seamless integration from the guidantfinancial.com Web site to the payment processor and back-office systems. By implementing TPI Software SmartPayments Server software, Guidant is able to speed payment processing by 400 percent. As the company continues to acquire more customer accounts, the technology will scale easily to support the growth. This forward-thinking approach, which is a core value of Guidant, will help the company better serve its customers and stay ahead of its competition.

With approximately 300 branches throughout Italy’s five central regions, the Banca Marche Group has more than 450,000 customers and 2,900 employees. The growth of the group over the last few years has added pressure to employees’ daily lives and led management to standardize and improve control of the bank’s information assets. After a careful assessment of the solutions available on the market, the group chose the powerful combination of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 and Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based servers. The new platform has increased employees’ productivity and helped the group realize a 75 per cent cut in production costs for management reports and a 90 per cent reduction in average distribution times. In addition, the lower costs have played a key role in the company doubling net profits

Townsend Analytics, Ltd. (TAL) has brought innovation and efficiencies to electronic trading with its RealTick suite of applications for analyzing, tracking, and trading stocks, futures, options, foreign exchange, and fixed income instruments for North American and European markets. TAL requires ultimate speed and flexibility of its infrastructure to consistently exceed the needs of its diverse client base. To enhance performance, TAL recently upgraded its databases to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005. TAL saw an immediate 20 percent increase in performance compared to SQL Server 2000, and faster query performance from using the new Table Partitioning feature. The 1 terabyte, single-instance SQL Server 2005 database supports 90 million equity quotes per day, with peak volumes reaching well over 60,000 quotes, or “ticks,” per second.