Strobe Improves Application Quality, Saves Millions in the Process

Recently De Goudse Verzekeringen, a major personal and commercial insurance company in the Netherlands, realized its enterprise mainframe capacity had become insufficient. With end-user response times slowing, internal users were pressuring the company for a system hardware upgrade much earlier than the IT department had scheduled. All signs pointed to a major—and expensive—system upgrade.

Founded in 1924, De Goudse is an independently operating insurance group focusing on property, health care and life insurance for personal and corporate markets. De Goudse merged with "Tiel Utrecht" in January 2001, resulting in a medium-sized insurer with a strong position in the market. Total sales of De Goudse reached 871 million euros (approximately $989 million U.S.) in 2001. About 1,100 people are employed by the new organization.

Strobe allowed us to understand the problem within a day, enabling us to implement a solution immediately. —Gerrit den Hoed, System Specialist, De Goudse Verzekeringen

It was after the merger that De Goudse’s IT department found that its available hardware capacity was insufficient for current corporate applications. End-user response times reflected the lack of capacity, and user organizations within De Goudse pressured the IT department for an early upgrade. However, the IT department found that an upgrade would result in an extra investment of at least one million euros. Software licenses and increased CPU capacity resulted in even higher costs. De Goudse requested that all of its software providers prepare cost estimates for upgraded software licenses. Compuware was one of the providers asked to provide an estimate. Pim van der Vorst, the Compuware account manager for De Goudse, explains Compuware’s reaction—and his trust that he had a comparatively inexpensive solution. "When we were faced with the challenge of De Goudse, we realized immediately that the solution could be to optimize CPU usage with Strobe."

The Solution Is Strobe

Strobe enables organizations to analyze the use of system resources (CPU, memory and I/O) by online and batch processing applications and to obtain a comprehensive understanding of critical bottlenecks. This allows system specialists to obtain quick insight regarding settings and parameters that should be adapted to resolve existing bottlenecks, and prevent unnecessary resource usage in the future.

Contrary to most other performance management tools, Strobe does not target hardware and operating system optimization, but rather the behavior of each application and the use of system services by the applications.

Strobe provides a Performance Profile, which is a comprehensive view of application performance even in complex environments with multiple subsystems and languages. Ultimately, Strobe helps IT staffs easily measure and analyze application performance to improve user code, transaction response time and throughput; and dramatically reduce resource-consumptive database calls.

Expectations Met—and Exceeded

"The tools we had before Strobe allowed us only to determine that we had a problem with CICS, but couldn’t tell us where the problem was," says Gerrit den Hoed, system specialist at De Goudse. "Strobe allowed us to understand our problem within a day, enabling us to implement a solution immediately."

Van der Vorst’s confidence in Strobe to reduce CPU usage was well placed. Strobe realized a 15 percent CPU load reduction within one day, resulting in an immediate 50 percent improvement in response times for De Goudse’s users. The number of requests from users for a fast upgrade quickly fell to zero.

Within two weeks, a peak load reduction of 23 percent was realized—recapturing the cost of De Goudse’s investment in Strobe. Even more importantly, Strobe helped De Goudse realize savings of a quarter of a million euros in licensing costs per year for IBM software, and savings of at least several hundreds of thousands of euros per year on currently owned OEM software.

Currently, De Goudse and its IT department expect to further reduce their peak load significantly by applying Strobe to the rest of its system. "Strobe is a unique product for which I have not seen an alternative," says den Hoed. "We now have resource usage under control. We are again able to satisfy the standards as recorded in our service level agreements with our end users. The user organization is very satisfied, and we are able to deliver better service at a lower cost."