Customer Success: Financial Service Providers
Business Benefits
Relativity Technologies has helped 7 of the world's top 10 financial services organizations to modernize their enterprise applications.
Financial services organizations rely on sophisticated enterprise applications to execute their daily operations. These large application portfolios govern corebanking, relationship management, investment banking, and other key business processes. But over time, these applications tend to become more complex, inflexible, and inefficient.
Relativity Technologies can help. The world's leading financial service providers have relied on the Modernization Workbench® platform to realign their enterprise application portfolios with business needs.
Transition Business Logic to a Business Rule Engine
Major Financial Services Provider
Application documentation and analysis uncover complexities and yield current understanding of a core system. Code re-factoring yields more efficient and maintainable applications -- with half the code.
This financial services organization automated its financing processes through a large and inflexible legacy application. To increase its flexibility, the organization sought to understand the structure and function of the application and develop a roadmap towards Enterprise Application Modernization. The sheer size of the application, with tens of thousands of legacy objects, required an automated analysis solution. The Modernization Workbench accelerated the roadmapping by delivering a base of metrics and documentation of the application. These metrics, combined with generated code quality measurements, allowed the organization to plan how to increase the efficiency of the application.
In an additional project for the organization, a systems-integration partner was charged with mining the business rules of a core financing application. The objective was to transition the rules to a leading business rule engine. Using the Modernization Workbench's business rule analysis features, including powerful, customizable queries, analysts were able to locate numerous rules buried within the code. The Modernization Workbench's querying and reporting tools provided analysts with detailed information about the rules' functions and behavior, simplifying documentation. The collected information was then readily exported from the Modernization Workbench's XML-based rules repository and loaded into the rules engine repository.
Reducing Application Complexity Boosts Efficiencies
Major International Bank
Application documentation and analysis uncover complexities and yield current understanding of a core system. Code re-factoring yields more efficient and maintainable applications -- with half the code.
This leading bank relied on a powerful system to manage its clients' investment portfolios. Written and maintained by a third party, there was a marked increase in application complexity and inflexibility. In the highly competitive financial services industry it is imperative for banks to be able to adjust business processes to meet emerging demands. But with little insight into the outsourced system, the bank's IT department could not rapidly translate business requirements into technical realities within the application.
After years of modifications due to changing business requirements, the code had grown to be significantly different than the original specifications. Further, the sheer size of the application had also contributed to its complexity, which meant that accurate and current documentation simply wasn't available. Without detailed information about how the application was structured, the IT team could not hope to efficiently maintain and enhance the system going forward.
During the initial assessment phase of the transition the Modernization Workbench provided the team with essential metrics and visualizations. It also uncovered critical pieces of information about the architecture of the application that would have dramatically impacted the IT team's ability to manage the application. By discovering these hurdles prior to the termination of its contract with the third-party, the bank was able to collect additional information necessary for application portfolio management.
Initially thought to be just 8 million lines of code, Relativity Technologies' software solution demonstrated that the application had grown to more than 20 million lines. The assessment also generated detailed metrics about the system like level of complexity and change frequency. The metrics and documentation that the Modernization Workbench created were so detailed that team members were able to quickly get up-to-speed on the functioning of the application and become highly productive. It also allowed the IT director to plan his resource allocation more effectively in anticipation of the transition. Relativity Technologies gave "us the foundation we needed to make and implement this strategic decision," said the IT director.
Once the analysis was in place, the Modernization Workbench was employed to re-architect the application. Migrating to a more standard environment and significantly reducing (by nearly 50 percent) the quantity of code employed while preserving the business processes of the application. The result: a more efficient and maintainable application that best supports the bank's business.
Reduction in CPU Consumption with Application Modernization
Global Logistics Agency
Rich analysis uncovers inefficiencies, yielding 8-10% reduction in CPU usage.
A global logistics agency relies on sophisticated enterprise applications to automate its core business processes. As these applications were modified over time, they grew more complex as the levels of non-standard and dead code rose. Complexities have not only reduced the flexibility of the business and the cost to adapt, they also have multiplied the processing burden on the company's hardware.
The agency's mainframe environment is structured such that with each increase in CPU consumption, the licensing cost for third-party software increases. This meant that any efficiencies that could be gained from a reduction in application size and complexity would yield immediate licensing savings. Further, more efficient applications would enable more efficient development processes and accelerate change requests.
Relativity Technologies' Modernization Workbench was deployed to assess opportunities for Enterprise Application Modernization related efficiency gains. Using pre-built queries, the Modernization Workbench uncovered numerous problem areas that directly contributed to the rising mainframe licensing costs:
The Modernization Workbench then was able to accelerate the renovation of the application based on the identified needs:
- The Modernization Workbench allowed developers to concentrate application renovation efforts specifically on areas identified as representing the greatest complexity.
- The platform accelerated the extraction of dead code, eliminating it with no impact to the functioning of the application.
- The assessment team used the Modernization Workbench's querying functionality and database reporting features to locate where more efficient database access could be implemented.
The immediate result of the assessment and renovation was lowered application complexity and a smaller code base. This reduced the CPU consumption level by 8-10%, decreasing licensing costs significantly. When these cost reductions are extended across the enterprise, the Enterprise Application Modernization savings are extrapolated into many millions of dollars. The reduction of application complexity also has resulted in numerous additional benefits:
- Faster processing meant that transactions could be executed more quickly, making the organization more responsive.
- Freed CPU time is now available for use by other core processing activities.
- Lowered complexity allows developers to execute change request more quickly, further improving flexibility and reducing cost per change. These benefits will compound over time as the targeted application continues to execute for years to come.
- Because the quality of the application was enhanced, it was easier to support. In fact, the number of help desk tickets declined from several hundred a week to only twenty or thirty per day. This cut support costs from nearly a million dollars to just $150,000 on an annualized basis.
Extending Application Life via Modernization
National City Corporation
Business rule identification and application componentization yields modernized, web-enabled applications and reusable business logic; Return on Investment estimated to be 200-300%.
National City Corporation (NCC), one of the largest bank holding companies in the U.S. with over $100 billion in total assets, is no stranger to the realities of technology change. Like most financial services firms, NCC relies on its enterprise applications to run its business. In fact, those applications shape much of the firm's interactions with customers and partners. As a result, upgrading its Corporate Automation System (CAS) application to a Web-based environment, with greater flexibility, lower costs, and reduced maintenance issues became a significant priority.
NCC concluded that the most efficient, cost-effective way to harness the value of its existing assets and renovate its current application was through an Enterprise Application Modernization approach. To do so, they chose to work with Relativity Technologies and our market leading Modernization Workbench software platform.
The Modernization Workbench was deployed to accelerate the renovation of the CAS system. The Modernization Workbench analyzed the complex code and isolated the core business rules of the system. The componentized business logic could then be efficiently reused as part of the web-enabled architecture. By retaining this business logic, National City was able to ensure that its operations would be continue to execute in the manner they expected following the application modernization initiative.
"Relativity Technologies' Enterprise Application Modernization solutions enabled us to maintain the crucial functionality we depend on while allowing us to take advantage of new technologies and reduce costs -- with no disruption to our normal business activity," said a senior executive with National City. In fact, internal estimates put the return on investment as being 200 to 300 percent.
Identifying Application Boundaries Limits Risk
Major International Bank
Sophisticated analysis uncovers 'touch points' between an application and related systems; avoids cascade of errors stemming from the retirement of multiple applications.
This highly respected international bank relies on a declining language to manage many of its enterprise applications. As the result of a shift in the strategy of the bank, changes to the application portfolio were required. The development group identified a particular set of applications that would be removed from its portfolio. The challenge for the bank was that thousands of downstream applications relied on this information, and the bank needed to ensure that the removal of the applications would not cause a cascade of failures throughout the portfolio.
Relativity Technologies' professionals began by loading the application code into the Modernization Workbench knowledgebase. The Modernization Workbench generated detailed reports regarding the structure of the application portfolio. For instance, many external applications relied on the targeted applications for input. But because these requirements had built up over time, the interconnections were often undocumented. This made the task of addressing the potential impacts more challenging.
Relying on the Modernization Workbench repository the bank was able to understand how the applications were used throughout the portfolio. The Modernization Workbench provided rich reports that documented the data flow of the applications -- between programs and through sequential files. As a result, the bank understood how proposed changes would impact the application, and was able to de-risk the critical ongoing changes.
