Bank of Utah Saves with iSeries, ITI

Corrected: June 12, 2007

by Alex Woodie

The Bank of Utah, a privately owned bank in Ogden, Utah, has undergone an eServer iSeries-based technology refresh that significantly boosted the headroom on its transaction system, saved it $100,000 per year, and increased its flexibility to adopt new workloads, IBM recently reported in a case study published on its Web site.

In late 2004, the Bank of Ogden had just about run out of capacity on its old server that powered core financial applications, so it began looking for a replacement. According to CFO Doug DeFries, the bank's primary goals were to maximize internal efficiency, automate business processes, and enhance customer self-service.

"There were many areas the bank could automate, DeFries says. "For example, wire transfers, a big part of our business, were handled manually. And we had some problems with the old server that were affecting customers, so we needed to improve the computing infrastructure," he said.

The solution turned out to be a technology refresh involving a new eServer iSeries running software from Information Technology (ITI), a unit of Fiserv. While the Bank of Utah had run on ITI's mainframe-based applications since 1986, the software company had not previously supported the OS/400 platform. So when it became available, the bank explored that option.

"ITI is a great technology partner," says Matt Baxter, the bank's director of IT. "When they told us they were going to enhance competitiveness by supporting multiple platforms, including the iSeries, that sounded good to us. We certainly trust IBM, and what we learned about the scalability, flexibility, manageability, and reliability of the iSeries system was impressive."

In 2005, the bank completed its upgrade to a new iSeries Model 520 running ITI's Premiere suite of applications. Since then, the bank has found numerous benefits. Compared to the old mainframe-based system, the Bank of Utah expects to save $500,000 in hardware, software, and maintenance costs over the next five years. "And that doesn't include any of the internal labor savings from more efficient system administration," says Scott Parkinson, the bank's director of retail banking. "So when you talk TCO [total cost of ownership] of ITI Premier on the IBM iSeries, it's off the charts."

The bank also experienced an increase in processing speed with the new Model 520. Nightly batch jobs that previously took more than eight hours took less than an hour with the new system. Month- and quarter-end processing was reduced from 18 hours to less than four hours. And Backups that previously took three to four hours now take 10 to 20 minutes.

This article has been corrected. In the headline, the vendor ITI was misidentified as IBI. IT Jungle regrets the error.

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