Case studies

Business impact

Reduced processing time for a financial management application in the prototype environment by 94%.

Issue

The brokerage firm was interested in improving customer service and needed to find a way to improve the performance of a computationally intensive application.

Executive summary

Improving customer service for the brokerage firm meant spending less time running its computationally intensive financial management applications and more time offering solutions to its customers. IBM worked with the client to develop a Grid technology solution.

What IBM did

One of the brokerage firm's applications took more than four minutes to process. IBM Research was engaged to work with the client's technology group to focus on maximizing processor efficiency and reducing processing time.

IBM and the brokerage firm's technology group took an existing application that ran on non-IBM systems and Grid enabled it with IBM Server Allocation for WebSphere Application Server running RedHat Linux® on IBM eServer^TM xSeries^TM 330 machines.

The prototype Grid solution reduced the brokerage firm's processing time for the financial application from more than four minutes to 15 seconds without using high-performance parallel processing computers - making it a cost-effective and efficient solution. As a result, the brokerage firm can consider new levels of customer service. The new system could allow a financial advisor to meet with a client and explore various financial management scenarios as they're discussed - instead of asking the client to wait or sending the information later.

Capabilities applied

IBM Research works at the leading edge of computing. For the client, IBM Research was able to apply years of experience in developing parallel computing, optimizing applications and inventing hardware solutions to achieve a 94% reduction in processing time using Grid technology.