Fiserv supports major growth on existing infrastructure with IBM DB2 9 solution

Fiserv supports major growth on existing infrastructure with IBM DB2 9 solution
Fiserv is a global provider of information management and electronic commerce services for financial institutions across the United States. Since its beginning in 1984, Fiserv has grown by finding the right resources to meet clients’ strategic and day-to-day technology needs—developing industry-leading solutions, establishing key business partnerships, and acquiring and integrating companies that could enhance its portfolio.

Challenge
To help its business clients stay one step ahead, Fiserv must anticipate what those clients will want tomorrow, and make sure it has the right technology in place to make it happen. It staked its future years ago on IBM® DB2® and the IBM z/OS® operating system, a decision that continues to deliver 12 years later, supporting the explosive growth of Fiserv’s online financial services clients.

Fiserv implemented one of the early online bill payment applications, starting with just its own associates paying their bills online. At that time, the company implemented a single IBM z10 mainframe and a single IBM DB2 for z/OS solution because it felt those solutions provided the best capacity for growth, as well as the reputation and functionality needed for the financial needs of the organization.

When Fiserv began providing online bill payment applications to its financial institution clients, it started with a few hundred transactions a month but as adoption of the Internet grew, online bill payment increased to millions of transactions each month. This strained the database and prompted the company to look for scalability solutions.

Solution
Fiserv kept up with growing online transaction demands by adopting an IBM Parallel Sysplex® data sharing environment. It started with a one-member DB2 for z/OS and one z10 mainframe, and one logical partition (LPAR). The LPAR provided a subset of the IBM hardware resources, virtualized as a separate computer. As business needs increased, the IT group expanded to a three-member LPAR and three-member data sharing group. Continued growth drove the department to further expand to a nine-member DB2 for z/OS and the three LPARs, but with the same footprint.

As the online bill payment market expanded, Fiserv ushered in electronic bills, or e-bills, which contain all the same information as paper bills but are delivered online. E-Bills helped businesses gain efficiencies in billing while supporting green initiatives by eliminating much of the billing paper trail. Today, Fiserv supplies clients with approximately 226 million e-bills a year.

“We grew from a two, to three and then to nine-member data sharing, with a very small incremental cost. IBM solutions enabled us to grow and meet our business needs without paying a lot to support that infrastructure. Other platforms can grow but cost a lot more, and in terms of availability they are still trying to catch up with z10.”

As Fiserv adopts IBM DB2 9 for z/OS, it plans to restructure its applications to take full advantage of zIIP processors.

“The ability to execute our transactions on a native SQL stored procedures gives us a competitive advantage, lowers our operating costs and provides a superior level of service to our customers,” notes Ciabattoni.

The company also benefits from the traditional utility suite, specifically IBM’s non-disruptive online REORG utility which allows for 100 percent availability while reorganizing DB2 tablespaces and associated indexes with no downtime for dataset renames, when executing at the appropriate times. “We run thousands of these online utility jobs on a weekly basis, while production workload is running through our application” says Ciabattoni. “The product is stable, reliable, available and a great product for us to use.”

For monitoring within the system, both reactive and proactive, Ciabattoni and his team depend on IBM Tivoli® OMEGAMON® for DB2 Performance Monitor on z/OS. This single, comprehensive tool helps assess the efficiency of and optimize performance from DB2 in the z/OS environment. Fiserv has automated processes in place that utilizes OMEGAMON for DB2 Performance Monitor to monitor and provide analysis to maximize performance and enhance profitability.

“We use OMEGAMON and the batch reporting extensively,” reports Ciabattoni. “It’s the backbone of our DB2 monitoring, giving us a snapshot into our environment and what’s going on daily, both from a system and application perspective.”

Since Fiserv handles financial data for individuals and businesses the company has strict service level agreements (SLA) with its financial institution clients making it imperative to have systems in place that are reliable. IBM adheres to those standards.

“The IBM team I work with has the same goal we do: to satisfy the customer,” says Ciabattoni. “IBM’s success is Fiserv’s success, and ultimately the success of continued growth in online bill payment.”

Benefits
• Supports major growth on existing footprint with minimal infrastructure support costs
• Provides five-nines availability to customers
• Enables adherence to strict SLAs