Profiled:

Alnova Financial Solutions

10 September 2007

Accenture observed a growing number of small to medium sized banks trying to compete with larger players while controlling IT costs and maintaining customer focus. These banks needed a flexible and scaleable IT solution, and Accenture wanted to provide a product tailored to their needs.

Creating a solution from scratch would have been neither fast nor effective, and Accenture wanted to leverage its existing and proven Alnova mainframe-based system as far as possible. The bulk of the mainframe system was written in Cobol, and Accenture turned to Micro Focus and its Net Express product to support the reuse and extension of the existing Alnova mainframe application to the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Using Micro Focus Net Express, Accenture was able to successfully and rapidly migrate the Cobol core base of its application to Windows. Following the initial implementation, Accenture embarked on a series of large-scale benchmarks to determine and prove the scalability of the migrated system. Using an eight-way machine attached by a 24 CPU application server farm, Accenture was able to obtain 250 transactions per second. This easily proved the performance and scalability of the solution, providing more than enough processing power for the target banks along with a dramatic reduction in hardware infrastructure.

Thanks to the migration, Accenture is now able to deliver its Alnova core banking solution on Windows. By combining the reuse of the existing application with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Accenture has also been able to include new features in the existing system. In addition, access to Cobol business logic has been wrapped using Web services technology for integration purposes to align the solution to a service oriented architecture.

Working with Micro Focus, Accenture is now able to competitively deliver a large-scale mainframe Cobol application migration to a new and expanded customer base, offering all the advantages associated with modern agile business systems under Microsoft Windows, such as flexibility and speed to market. Accenture has already won several major customers with the Alnova .NET solution, including ABN Amro (Spain), Banco Azteca (Mexico) and Credem (Italy). "The installation at Banco Azteca in Mexico is a testimony to the robustness of Alnova on .NET and the flexibility and scalability the solution can provide our customers," says Alberto Gonzalez del Alamo, senior manager at Accenture.