Johannesburg, 27 Oct 2004
High-end information technology solutions, together with 10 years experience in the highly challenging emerging market, have come together into a powerful combination and provided the leading-edge for financial services company, Real People.
The company manages 260 000 debtors across its consumer and housing finance divisions, in addition to providing debt collection management services to some of SA`s largest companies. It believes its significant investment in ICT has allowed it to continually improve the information on its debtors books, valued at R1.1 billion. This, in turn, has resulted in Real People achieving one of the highest performing debtors books in the country.
"In a volume-based business such as ours, technology is paramount," says Real People`s chief information officer, Lo-Ammi Fourie.
Real People`s latest investment has been in a R1 million storage area network (SAN) solution to resolve degrading data retrieval times on its previous SCSI storage system. The CLARiiON CX400 SAN solution was supplied and installed by Business Connexion Border-Kei.
Real People provides finance solutions ranging from short-term loans to housing finance to the emerging market. It also specialises in the origination, acquisition, administration and collection of debtors` books, recently acquiring over R200 million in new debtors.
"Our operational databases now stand at over 1Tb and are growing steadily. With 600 users and over 60 branches on the system, we could see that performance would continue to deteriorate over time and we needed a solution to take us forward," says Fourie.
Real People has its own centralised credit management system running on a SQL Server database.
"The SAN solution is ideal for Real People`s need to consolidate the storage of its critical databases, improve its resource utilisation, connectivity to outlying branches and assure business continuity with improved data protection and system availability," says Deon Craytor, regional sales executive for Business Connexion East London.
"The system is highly scalable and has massive redundancy and duality built into it which enables the hot-swapping of parts and drives with no downtime. This is particularly important for Real People`s business."
The CLARiiON CX400 supplied by Business Connexion with 1.6Tb of storage is a MTI storage integration solution from EMC2. It is a sixth-generation, full fibre channel networked storage system that delivers high bandwidth and throughput.
For Real People`s IT manager, Bryan Nel, the decision to invest in the technology was a significant one. "Any change of this nature and magnitude provides its own set of unique challenges for which one needs to plan carefully. And in our case, it was no different. Setup took place over three days and when we switched over, it was business as usual with no teething problems."
A software utility bundled with the system is SnapView, which creates a snapshot of the live system within seconds. A snapshot is a logical point-in-time view of the live data, which enables the distribution of processing over multiple servers. Snapshots facilitate improved MIS and system development.
"Reports are more up-to-date and report generation has greatly improved user response times. This is particularly important for our 90-seat call centre environment, because our customers cannot afford to spend a long time on the phone. A faster service leads to more satisfied customers."
Share