Central Africa Building Society (CABS), Zimbabwe`s largest building society and the first to introduce innovations such as on-line banking, is experiencing an estimated 70% decrease in daily batch production work and a dramatic rise in system flexibility following the revamp of its IT system.
According to Mike Finnegan, deputy general manager of IT and operations at CABS, these benefits are due to the building society`s ongoing project - jointly devised by CABS and ICL Zimbabwe`s Topicl division - combining state-of-the-art Sun Enterprise 5000 servers, an Informix relational database and the more efficient writing of existing Cobol applications.
"Previously, CABS was running on older mainframe equipment, implemented by ICL Zimbabwe, with our core processes running on a logistics system which had been substantially customised over the years. As support of this system was becoming complex, and the solution itself was not giving us the flexibility needed to retain our leading position, we decided to move onto a new platform."
CABS is recognised as being an IT innovator in Zimbabwe, for example, the company was the first to bring on-line banking to local users. CABS was also one of the first Africa companies to use Sun`s high performance fibre attached Disk Storage Arrays - a contributing factor to the massive reduction in throughput based on the old systems. Finnegan sees the Sun implementation as key to remaining ahead of competitors.
"We have managed to cut daily batch production work from around 11 hours to approximately three. Not only this, we have also decreased partial (daily) refreshes by more than a third and a full (monthly) refresh from roughly 24 hours to about six hours," he adds.
The ongoing project also ensures Year 2000 compliancy to the CABS system.
Following ICL`s suggestion for CABS to look at Sun hardware and the Informix relational database management system (RDBMS), CABS decided not to buy a new application package, but rather to redevelop their existing program and applications and convert them to an open environment.
According to Derek Vincent, sales manager, ICL Zimbabwe, CABS now has far greater control over all applications. "For example, when the Zimbabwean tax laws were changed, it would have taken about a week to change the system using the old equipment. Using the new system, it took one day."
Ben Neveling, regional sales manager at Sun Microsystems RSA explains all of the building society`s existing applications have been moved onto the Sun system. "Results so far have been very positive - CABS has already experienced a major performance improvement over the old system. Interactive response times have dropped to an average of half a second."
The Sun Enterprise 5000 servers are arranged in a high availability cluster configuration, with a third server used as a disaster recovery platform, a data warehouse and also for development purposes. The clustered servers are linked over two kilometers fibre.
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