UST Global Highlights Consulting Work at Countrywide

Published: September 23, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Countrywide Financial, the mortgage loan giant based in Simi Valley, California, has long been regarded as one of the largest users of IBM Power Systems technology. When it was time to modernize the applications and begin the transition to a service oriented architecture (SOA), Countrywide brought in UST Global, an IT outsourcing firm that recently launched a new IT consulting division.

When it was founded in Laguna Hills, California, in 1998, UST Global was known as US Technology, and focused largely on the market for business process outsourcing (BPO) among the Global 2000 companies. Today, UST Global still maintains a large contingent of developers in India, but it's expanding its offerings to include more traditional IT consulting services.

Last week the company announced that one of five new customers of its Consulting Services group is Countrywide Financial, the embattled mortgage lender that was recently taken over by Bank of America. Countrywide was the largest mortgage servicing company in the country at one point, holding more than 9 million loans that were valued at nearly $1.5 trillion dollars (a number that should be taken with a grain of salt in lieu of the country's housing collapse and the U.S. government's plan to take over troubled loans).

Backing this financial behemoth was a proprietary loan origination and servicing application running on some of the biggest 32-way System i servers from IBM. However, as market conditions changed and IT continued to evolve, the folks in Countrywide's IT department realized they needed to change with the times, too. For Countrywide, that meant application modernization in the context of an SOA.

Sudhir Nair, Countrywide's executive vice president of application technologies, explained the situation. "It was important to make technological progress yet maintain our competitive edge by improving the functionality that had been implemented in our systems over several years," he said. "Also important was to leverage our investment and intellectual property built up in our iSeries-based servicing platform while at the same time evolve them technologically and integrate them seamlessly to other parts of the business, making them more agile and loosely coupled."

UST Global's consulting team delivered on that promise with a well-defined modernization process, tools, and an understanding of Countrywide's needs, Nair says. "Most importantly, they brought skilled professionals who were able to work within our parameters and delivered more than we expected. We look forward to our ongoing and continued relationship," Nair says.

For more information on UST Global, visit the company's Web site at www.ust-global.com.

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