Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) has been engaged by Thomson Financial, an operating unit of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC, TSX: TOC) and leading provider of information and technology solutions to the worldwide financial community, to help provide 55,000 institutional investors, portfolio managers and financial analysts with uninterrupted access to the company's Thomson ONE Analytics application.
The enterprise-class system from Unisys and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) helps employees receive the up-to-the-minute financial information they need to make faster investment decisions.
Thomson Financial turned to Unisys and Intel to help design a new platform based on Intel Xeon Processor MP and Unisys ES7000 servers, and to help migrate the users of Thomson's industry-leading First Call Web application to its new Thomson ONE Analytics application.
"If information is the life-blood of Thomson Financial's Thomson ONE Analytics application, then the Intel Xeon processor MP and Itanium 2 processor-powered ES7000s are its heart," said Richard Dracott, general manager, enterprise marketing and planning for Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. "Thomson's decision to support its critical data tier with both processors speaks to the complementary strength of Intel's enterprise server platforms for data intensive applications."
In a matter of months, Thomson ONE Analytics grew from supporting 500 users to supporting 55,000. The application achieved a 100 percent uptime while providing a 200 percent improvement in hardware performance, significantly higher speeds and greater availability.
"Thomson Financial customers expect extremely fast and reliable product performance," said Jeremy Lehman, senior vice president, technology, Thomson Financial. "When we migrated 55,000 customers from First Call Web to Thomson ONE Analytics, we turned to Unisys and Intel for their expertise with big, powerful systems. We grew the number of users by 10,000 percent, with 400 percent faster speed overall, building on ES7000s and Xeon MP."
A Successful Migration
Thomson ONE Analytics is a real-time, integrated analytical workflow solution for institutional investors, offering world-class content combined with powerful analytical tools and intelligent navigation. Thomson ONE Analytics enables clients to monitor markets, portfolios and securities, identify and analyze investment opportunities, and communicate their findings.
Migrating customers from First Call Web to Thomson One Analytics was one of the largest migration projects, based on the number of users, in the financial industry. It included transforming the application from one that provided static data to one that now offers integrated workflow and is scaled for lightning-fast and reliable service, offering all of Thomson Financial's components to the full range of Thomson customers.
Thomson Financial's overall growth is attributed to the acquisition of smaller firms with market-leading applications in individual segments, and the ability to scale and integrate those applications into Thomson Financial's core offerings.
Today, the Thomson ONE Analytics application runs on two 16-processor ES7000 servers featuring the latest Intel Xeon processor MP and Microsoft Windows 2000 Data Center Server. These servers store mission-critical databases that house six months of qualitative research data. In addition, an eight-processor ES7000 server based on Intel Itanium(R) 2 processor technology and the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, provides investors with faster, higher-volume access to more than five years of historical financial data.
"Thomson ONE Analytics' user growth was outpacing the ability of its commodity server environment to support the required speed and availability," said Chander Khanna, vice president, platform marketing, Unisys. "By comparison, the ES7000 with the Intel Xeon processor MP delivers significantly improved performance, higher availability and enough scalability to support 10 times its previous workload at a lower cost of ownership."
The database is under tough demands to provide fast information. Investors query the research data, in many cases using an incredibly complex, highly demanding set of query conditions. By consolidating the application's workload onto two servers, Thomson Financial can now provide customers with access to that data in near real time.