Fidelity National Financial has undertaken a four-year
project to replace its distributed, multisupplier computing
environment with a centralised infrastructure based on IBM
technology.
The project, which will cost "tens of millions" of dollars, will
enable Fidelity National to increase speed and reduce management
complexity in its mortgage division, which processes $8 trillion in
loans every night for the nation's largest banks.
Fidelity National chief technology officer Joe Nackashi said the
existing infrastructure is built around two IBM eServer zSeries 900
mainframes and 800 to 1,000 servers. Those systems run a range of
distributed client/server applications, including Microsoft SQL
Server and Oracle databases. The plan is to consolidate those
systems onto three new IBM eServer zSeries 990 T-Rex mainframes
running IBM's DB2 database.
The project also involves streamlining Fidelity National's
communications with member banks by means of a portal-based system
built with IBM's WebSphere middleware and its Rational Unified
Process methodology, a set of software development best
practices.
"Clearly, from our perspective, we will need fewer people to
manage and develop the environment. So you're going to see a clear
ROI," Nackashi said.
By choosing a single supplier, Nackashi said he could move away
from "the complexities of a client/server distributed world" and to
simplify supplier accountability. "You know how it goes when you
have all the vendors doing all the finger-pointing."
TowerGroup analyst Guillermo Kopp said there has been steady
growth in the amount of IT money financial services companies are
spending to replace legacy systems for some years now. The driver
is cost containment.
In 2004, system revamps will represent $41.8bn, or 12% of a
total $347.2bn that financial services companies are expected to
invest in IT worldwide, Kopp said. In 2000, by comparison, legacy
transformations represented less than 10% of total IT dollars spent
by the industry, Kopp said.
Fidelity's existing Cobol-based mortgage processing system has
"significant lines of code", which is a challenge to manage when
adding functionality, Nackashi said. And, although 70% of the
system's processes operate in real time, customers are asking for
more service-oriented architectures, with increased functionality
and scalability.
Lucas Mearian writes for Computerworld