GoldenGate Software, a leading provider of high availability and real-time data integration solutions, today announced that Fortis Turkey is using the GoldenGate live reporting solution to improve real-time access to its operational data.
Using the GoldenGate solution, Fortis Turkey has created a single operational data store (ODS) and achieved considerable performance improvements for overall reporting and has significantly streamlined the overall architecture. In addition, Fortis Turkey has realized reduced server CPU load and storage system I/O requirements on its online transaction processing (OLTP) systems - with further reductions of up to 50% anticipated.
Fortis Bank provides a total package of banking services to personal, business and institutional customers globally through its own high-performance channels and via other partners. The bank has built up a strong presence in the European retail banking market, operating through a variety of distribution channels. It offers financial services to companies, institutional clients and high net worth individuals and provides integrated solutions to enterprise and entrepreneur. Fortis Bank in Global has 38,000 staff people and a presence in almost 50 countries. Fortis Bank made a strong entrance to the Turkish finance market in 2005, acquiring Dışbank. Now, Fortis Turkey with a strong capital structure continues its strong growth with high quality services, financial expertise, innovative and affordable products. Fortis Turkey is active in retail, corporate and merchant banking and asset management.
To store and manage the wealth of operational data generated by the business and its customers, Fortis Turkey uses Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase and IBM DB2 database management systems. As Abdullah Öngül, Head of Database Management Team at Fortis Turkey, explains, the highly heterogeneous database management systems have created significant IT challenges from a data integration standpoint. "Having a diverse and silo-ed DMBS architecture makes it difficult for us to access data efficiently and with low-latency for reporting purposes, which in turns causes additional time consuming development work to run livve reports for the business."
To overcome this problem Fortis Turkey decided to deploy a single operational data store, and following rigorous testing in Fortis Turkey's own production environment, Fortis Turkey selected the GoldenGate real-time data integration solution to provide the business with live reporting capabilities.
"The GoldenGate live reporting solution gives us the ability to have multiple reporting instances which can be used concurrently," said Öngül. "Simple and easy to manage, it not only solves our reporting and real-time access issues, but also addresses the potential OLTP transaction performance problems that we experienced from running reports and queries on those primary systems."
With the help of its partner, ITD, head-quartered in Turkey, Fortis Turkey implemented the GoldenGate solutions to pull data continuously from 6 Oracle, 8 Microsoft SQL Server and 3 Sybase database environments targeting a single Oracle Unix operational data store. In July 2008, Fortis Turkey commenced this project to provide efficient reporting against the banking and credit card transaction business units and in October 2008 redirected all reporting activity to the new operational data store which resulted in eliminating the need for several OLTP databases.
Fortis Turkey has achieved numerous tangible benefits including:
- significantly reduced latency by offloading transactional information from primary systems to ODS
- minimal development resources to maintain the process
- improved performance for reporting and analysis
- reduced CPU and disk I/O usage on all OLTP systems.
Osman Özdemir, Sales Director of ITD, commented: "Access to low latency data for critical business reporting is particularly important to banking and financial services organizations that rely on accurate data to determine key business decisions. For a market-leading organization such as Fortis Turkey, the GoldenGate real-time data integration solution is a critical infrastructure component which has an immediate impact on key business processes."