Chrysalis Creates Business Success for Adelaide Bank
After acquiring the Leveraged Equities margin lending business from JP Morgan Chase in 2000, Adelaide Bank experienced difficulties integrating the legacy application, on which the newly acquired business ran, into the Bank’s IT infrastructure.
The application was developed and hosted on a Unix platform running Data General COBOL, an outdated legacy language with limited support for today’s Web-driven business environment.
Adelaide Bank searched the market for solutions to the problem, considering three main options: build a new application, buy a different application, or fix the problem.
“Building a new application from scratch proved cost- & time-prohibitive, and there were no existing applications that matched our business requirements,” said John van Ruth, CIO, Adelaide Bank.“
The only solution was to fix the problem, and we considered a number of different COBOL
|
solutions before arriving at the decision to work with Arena and Micro Focus.”
The migration went extremely well, aided by Micro Focus’s advanced migration tools. The application performs significantly better on the Windows platform than it did on Unix.
“We had users who were so used to seeing the “Processing” message as their jobs were running, that they were now calling the Help Desk to report that the application had crashed, when in fact it had already finished processing their requests.” recalls van Ruth.
Migration from Data General COBOL to Micro Focus COBOL was completed in December 2003.
Following this, the Bank went through the process of porting the application’s file system to SQL Server. Arena Consulting, a firm specializing in COBOL database migration, was approached to build a “bridge product” that spanned the two file systems and to convert the data, allowing the COBOL code to communicate natively with SQL Server.
|
The Margin Lending business now integrates seamlessly with the Bank’s IT infrastructure, making it easier to manage and to extend its services to other divisions.
With the limitations of the legacy application removed, the Bank recently purchased and successfully integrated an $800 million margin lending business, making it the second largest margin lender in Australia behind Colonial.
Today the Margin Lending business is a strategic business unit for the Bank and is considered to be a growth business with plans to double its loan book by 2010. This strategy is underwritten by the application’s ability to integrate with targeted partners.
|
