Fleet Bank Launches Enterprise Data Warehouse
Based on Informix Technology
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Informix Corporation, a technology leader in enterprise database-powered solutions, has announced that Fleet Bank, the tenth largest bank holding company in the United States, has launched an enterprise data warehouse, based on the Informix Dynamic Server with the Advanced Decision Support Option and the Extended Parallel Option.
The enterprise data warehouse and primary marketing data mart are in full production with 64 CPUs on a cluster of Sun Microsystems 6000 servers. "Completion of the Informix-powered data warehouse is a major milestone for Fleet -- we have loaded data on millions of customers from over thirty different sources," stated Randall Grossman, senior vice president and director of customer data management and analysis at Fleet Financial Group. "We are now on the cusp of realizing the true value of the data warehouse as we launch the marketing data mart for mining and analysis."
The Fleet data warehouse is one of the largest and most integrated, enterprise data warehouse and data mart infrastructures in the financial services industry. The three-tier client/server data warehouse fully standardizes data from sources across the enterprise, thus giving Fleet a comprehensive view of its estimated 10 million customers for more effective target marketing, cross-selling, customer retention, and product redesign.
Although the initial focus is in support of marketing functions, the breadth and depth of data being captured will allow Fleet to rapidly deploy data marts in support of risk management, compliance reporting, profitability, and other mission-critical applications.
Currently, a primary marketing data mart running Informix technology is being populated with information from the enterprise data warehouse for activity-specific data mining and marketing from SAS Institute Inc. and Exchange Applications Inc. KPMG is the system integrator on the project and has provided the expertise in architecting and building the data warehousing infrastructure.
"The Fleet three-tier data warehousing implementation is an excellent example of the Informix capability to deliver an integrated, total solution in an open systems environment working with our business partners," said Chuck Ballard, senior marketing manager at Informix. "And, our leading technology has provided the foundation to enable Fleet to turn their data into a business advantage and meet their aggressive ROI targets."
To meet the scalability, flexibility and performance requirements for the scope of the data warehouse project, Fleet selected Informix Dynamic Server with the Advanced Decision Support Option and the Extended Parallel Option over database technology from IBM, Oracle, and Teradata. "Informix is the recognized technology leader in data warehousing -- it is clearly the highest performing, and most scalable and flexible relational database technology available," stated Grossman.
"To manage the growth of our company and to meet our ROI objectives of over 70%, we needed the price-performance of Informix's single database architecture to keep our costs down and performance up, while delivering the requirements for ease of use, speed of operation, and scalability."
Informix's Advanced Decision Support Option extends the base functionality of Informix Dynamic Server to support query-intensive complex and analytical applications. It offers a set of high-end data warehousing features to enable fast data access, analysis, and management.
The Advanced Decision Support Option scales from the smallest data mart to the largest data warehouse, and delivers optimized performance across any parallel hardware architecture -- from symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers to the largest massively parallel processing (MPP) systems. Informix's Extended Parallel Option provides the performance and scalability required with very large database architectures. It features a completely shared-nothing design, offering proven near-linear scalability to hundreds of processors for high-level performance on terabytes of business data.
To date, the enterprise data warehouse has collected customer account, transaction and demographic information from Fleet's retail and commercial businesses. To form the basis of the enterprise data warehouse, Fleet has initially drawn from 34 data sources, including the ATM, branch, deposit, loan, investment, and telephone banking systems, and eventually will expand to 66 sources.
The data warehouse, currently loaded with 350 gigabytes of information, is expected to grow to four terabytes. Initially, the data warehouse supports 125 users, growing to over 1,000 users by the end of 1999. Fleet performs daily incremental loads, adding data such as new customers, and updates to customer profiles. The data warehouse is updated daily, weekly, or monthly depending on the data source.
Fleet Financial Group, headquartered in Boston, is a $100.7 billion diversified financial services company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (FLT). The nation's sixth largest commercial lender and New England's leading small business lender, Fleet's lines of business include consumer banking, government banking, mortgage banking, corporate finance, commercial real estate lending, insurance services, discount brokerage services, equipment leasing and asset-based lending.
Fleet also provides investment management services for both individuals and institutional clients and currently has more than $80 billion in assets under management. With 1,200 branches and over 2,400 ATMs, Fleet also provides 24-hour telephone banking as well as electronic banking services through the Fleet PC Banking Center.
Informix's database servers, application development tools, superior customer service, and strong partnerships enable the company to be at the forefront of major information technology solution areas including data warehousing, OLTP, and Web/content management. For more information, see http://www.informix.com