Company 

Customer: Rural Servicios Informaticos (RSI) is the IT services provider for all of Spain’s rural savings banks. Member banks have over six million customers and perform more than four and a half million transactions per day.

Challenge: To reduce operational costs and improve the flexibility required by member banks, RSI decided to migrate its Centro de Information—a mission critical mainframe application—to an HP Unix environment. In its mainframe environment, Centro de Information ran about 450 million instructions per second (MIPS) and between 800–1,200 MIPS for batch processing. This resulted in high maintenance costs and required a four- to six-hour batch window.

Solution: To resolve these issues, RSI turned to BluePhoenix Solutions and Maraton Information Systems to migrate the Centro de Information application to an HP Unix environment. Instead of using a manual migration process that would have taken an estimated two and half years, RSI used a step-by-step methodology combined with BluePhoenix™ PlatformMigrator automated tools to migrate the customer information application. First, the application code was migrated to Unix, next the data was migrated to Oracle, and last the hardware architecture was migrated to the HP platform. The entire project was completed in only nine months, was transparent to end users, and business was conducted as usual during the entire time.

Benefits: RSI’s IT service offering is now dependent on a system platform that has less costly hardware and a more open operating. This puts it in a strong position for future expansion and migration of other applications. In the previous environment, batch processing used to take up to six hours. Now it only takes about three hours. In addition, RSI has also experienced a dramatic reduction in MIPS consumption and machine resources, which has provided an approximate 140% increase in overall IT efficiency. And by moving to the HP platform, the mainframe CPU has also been eliminated, which has lessened both IT costs and administrative overhead. Overall, the migrated Centro de Information saves the company 80% annually in overall hardware and application maintenance costs. This has led to a substantial rise in transaction volume and time-to-market for new products. It has also increased company profitability and savings that can be reinvested into technologies that continue to improve the service and products RSI provides to its member banks and their customers.

"The migration was able to improve batch window time efficiency by approximately 140%. This has led to a substantial rise in transaction volume and time-to-market for new products. The BluePhoenix solution was transparent, automated, and preserved our original investment in IT infrastructure. We were able to carry on business as usual during the entire duration of the project."