BIAT Tunisian Bank Selects PeerLogic LiveContent TRANS

PeerLogic, a leading supplier of smart application networks for eBusiness, announced that its LiveContent TRANS has been selected by Banque Internationale Arabe de Tunisie, the largest private Tunisian bank, to move its legacy banking applications to a Sun Enterprise 10000 server (also known as Starfire) to provide faster and better customer service to retain market share in a highly competitive banking environment.

BIAT needed to develop customer-focused banking solutions to keep clients loyal to BIAT bank services. The bank selected PeerLogic and Sun Microsystems to restructure its IT system, improve customer services in its existing 100- branch network throughout Tunisia, and add five branches each year to meet customer demands for local service.

The bank, which collects a rapidly-growing database of information daily from the 100 branches and runs batch jobs overnight, migrated 3,000 programs, 2,500 files, and 350 batch jobs with 6,500 steps from the mainframe to the Sun Enterprise server, using LiveContent TRANS and a relational database for some of the files. All applications were moved to the system in just eight months, a quick move for a system of that size. The new system runs batch jobs 20 percent faster than the mainframe did, and there was minimal retraining required for developers on the new system. To accomplish the migration quickly and efficiently, PeerLogic and Sun teamed with TMI, a large, experienced Tunisian systems integrator.

BIAT's previous mainframe was limiting the bank's expansion and service capabilities. Running the core banking applications since the bank was formed in 1976, the system lacked flexibility to adapt to rapidly evolving market needs and customer demands. In addition, the existing system could not handle projected business growth, and high operational costs threatened to place the bank at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace. Replacing its mainframe with a flexible, scaleable open system would enable BIAT to take advantage of future eBusiness opportunities for international growth.

The requirements for BIAT's new IT system were very precise: the solution had to create and sustain client relationships by providing centralized customer information. It needed to fully automate standard transaction services and simultaneously minimize transaction servicing and operational overhead. And, finally, it had to be on a platform offering flexibility for future expansion and growth. PeerLogic's products, LiveContent TRANS and LiveContent BATCH, were good matches for BIAT's needs.

"We were impressed by the combination of PeerLogic's automated tools and the extensive migration experience of the team. The pilot went very smoothly and gave us confidence that the larger migration could be successfully executed," noted Brahim Ben Ali, CIO at BIAT.

PeerLogic is the international leader in supplying scaleable component and legacy open systems middleware for high-performance transaction and batch systems for large enterprises. PeerLogic software has been used to successfully migrate mission-critical enterprise applications from mainframe systems to open, affordable UNIX and NT systems at more than 600 customer sites worldwide.

For its open systems hardware platform, BIAT chose a Sun Enterprise 10000 server, which has been designed specifically to meet the challenges of today's data center. The server can be partitioned into sixteen Dynamic System Domains that can be created, resized, pooled and deleted on-the-fly in response to changes in application demand, enabling customers to run the most intensive, multi-terabyte applications for data warehousing, decision support, OLTP and data analytics on a single, scalable server. Sun is the only UNIX vendor to offer this mainframe-like feature.

"The Sun server parallels mainframe functions, ensuring that we have a familiar and manageable environment for our mission-critical applications," said Ben Ali. "Sun is a trusted name in open systems environments and we knew our applications would run efficiently on this platform, helping reduce operating costs."

"The Sun Enterprise 10000 servers, rated at more than 3,100 mainframe MIPS, offers a robust solution to fully support the requirements of large numbers of users in mission-critical banking operations as well as the rapidly growing base of Internet services," explained Steve Campbell, director of marketing for the Data Center and High Performance Computing Group at Sun Microsystems. "Companies can achieve greater cost savings and higher performance than with typical mainframes by combining a Sun Enterprise server with PeerLogic software."

BIAT's return on investment in the new system includes a 20 percent reduction in batch job running time, which will enable the necessary banking updates to be done overnight, increased productivity of bank employees through access to the new database, better system performance, and lower cost of system ownership. These benefits, provided by the investment in the PeerLogic and Sun system, specifically meet BIAT's stated project goals of a centralized customer database to improve client loyalty, automation of transactions for reduced operating costs, and platform expansion capabilities for future growth.

About PeerLogic

PeerLogic Inc, the LiveContent Company, creates smart application networks for eBusiness. Smart application networks provide the infrastructure that allows businesses to automate eBusiness transactions using all corporate data assets. Our modular suite of proven components, LiveContent, enables our customers to integrate a vast array of corporate information to tune online business relationships. LiveContent automates trend and business analysis to improve customer and partner experiences and provides data that helps companies to rapidly react to changing market conditions. To date, approximately 1,000 companies worldwide license our software. Our customers include Bell Atlantic, Bank of New York, BNP Paribas, British Aerospace, British Telecom (BT), Chicago Board of Trade, Critical Path, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Entrust, Express Scripts, General Electric, Lloyds TSB, Lucent, Nortel, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Royal Mail, Telcordia, Vodafone and Volkswagen of North America. Visit www.peerlogic.com.

Contact Schwartz Communications Inc for PeerLogic Inc, Kathleen Shanahan or Rob Mowry, 415-512-0770, kshanahan or robm@schwartz-pr.com.