FNB and Compuware SA - Saving on MIPS

Leading South African financial services provider, First National Bank, runs many of its applications on mainframe because of the stability and power of the legacy technology.

Hogan Technology, the technology division within FNB, is charged with maintaining this specialised environment and ensuring it continues to deliver the performance required by an organisation operating in a highly competitive market and catering to the needs of millions of customers.

The division has been able to deliver on its mandate by utilising a range of tools from Compuware for performance testing as well as benchmarking, while simultaneously keeping FNB's maintenance and performance costs firmly under control. Thanks to judicious and integrated usage of Compuware tools - and despite significant growth in demand on the mainframe systems as the bank has grown and added new services - an expensive MIPS upgrade has been avoided for over five years.

The problem

FNB's mainframe environment is (in a nutshell) responsible for all national operations that include the various branches, Internet services such as the newly-revamped eBucks as well as ATM transactions.

As FNB's IT division, Hogan Technologies faced two key problems: to ensure the financial services provider's legacy mainframe environment remains stable, yet is able to continuously deliver the levels of service required by an organisation operating in a highly competitive environment in which the main differentiators are service levels and cost.

This demands that FNB's mainframe applications are not only properly tested at all times, but that they are able to cope effectively with increasing workload demands. Importantly, the challenge for the IT division is to maintain a watching brief on processing loads so as to identify potential overload problems which could result in system degradation or failure.

The Compuware solution

The IT division implemented a combination of Compuware's Strobe and QACentre Enterprise applications to maintain FNB's mainframe environment.

QACentre delivers a unique offering of automated testing products and solutions designed to validate applications running in the full spectrum of environments, isolate and correct problems, and ensure that systems can handle anticipated load-before applications go live.

Hogan Technologies used QA Centre for automated testing and load testing. Once they have simulated a load they use Strobe to optimise the applications performance in a specific environment.

(Strobe is the cornerstone of Compuware's application performance products for managing application performance in complex environments.)

They also use Strobe in the production environment to regularly confirm that they have optimal performance at all time. It is particularly utilised as part of a "look-alike" system that runs customer benchmark scenarios on a monthly basis.

According to Jay Prag, systems architect at Hogan Technologies, the look-alike system runs real-life scenarios thus enabling the bank to proactively deal with any possible problems - finding solutions in a timely manner and, therefore, improving the bank's overall customer service-delivery.

"We also utilise the Compuware tools to accurately assess feasibility of upgrades; ensuring that we don't incur any unnecessary costs while at the same solving capacity issues," he adds.

The result

Despite significant growth in demand on the mainframe systems which handle all national operations at the banks branches, Internet services - including new applications associated with the recently revamped eBucks loyalty scheme - and all ATM transactions, FNB has not had to invest in a MIPS upgrade for over five years.

"Yet the performance of the mainframe environment has not been compromised in any way. We have not avoided a MIPS upgrade for the sake of saving money: rather, we utilise Compuware tools to accurately assess the feasibility of upgrades.

"So far, because the tools we employ enable us to resolve capacity issues through other techniques, we have not had to incur what would otherwise have been unnecessary costs," Prag explains.

While the IT division has a strong contingent of IT specialists and as result develops a lot of solutions in-house, Compuware's support and after-sales services are utilised when the need arises.

Prag adds that FNB is "more than happy" with the services received from Compuware and stresses that the company's solutions play an integral part in its mainframe maintenance, development and troubleshooting efforts.

"Part of our success is all our solutions deployed have to adhere to stringent criteria as well as be cost-sensitive - Compuware's products definitely adhere to these prerequisites," he says.

Salome Kwant, Technical Support Manager at Compuware SA says Compuware's relationship with FNB is very strong. "We've throughout the years seen some major successes and believe that this indicative of things to come. We've throughout strived to walk that extra mile and believe that has indeed paid dividends, for Compuware as well as for our customer - and our customer's customer," he concludes.