Financial Services Firm Banks on Strobe to Bring IT in Line with Business

So how does a credit card processing services provider accommodate an ever-growing client base without its computing resources gnawing at profits? Ask members of Certegy’s Development and Support team, and they’ll tell you there’s no trick to it—that is, if you use the Strobe performance management solution.

Founded in 2001 when spun off from Equifax, Certegy processes and authorizes credit card and check transactions for over 6,500 financial institutions, 117,000 retailers and 100 million consumers worldwide. With a client base that large, Certegy can’t afford problems with back-end data processing. Every year Certegy oversees a high volume of business transactions. In 2003, its Card Services division processed more than 46 million credit cards worldwide and 24 million domestically. That’s a number Bob Fountain, director of Certegy’s Card Production Support, expects to see rise as the company continues to expand its credit, debit and merchant card processing services through growth within its customer base and strategic acquisitions. "Our institutions acquire more cardholders every month, and we’re looking at several strategic initiatives with overseas and domestic processing," Fountain explains. "We just keep growing, so we’re trying to process more cards without spending more on MIPS."

MIPs and salaries are my highest unit cost per month. Strobe and iStrobe have helped us effectively manage costly  MIPS allowing us to continue to achieve our business objectives. —Nancy White, CIO, Certegy

Since CPU upgrades were too costly, the company needed to find ways of getting more out of the computing resources they already had. In short, Certegy needed to streamline internal processing and tune application performance to save on processing power. Certegy left the task to a special support team--Fountain and a group of 24 developers--and the automated strengths of Compuware Strobe performance management.

Certegy hadn’t always had a specialized team, or tool, in place to focus strictly on improving application efficiency. In the past, application tuning required development teams to spend hours sifting through lines of code by hand. Competitive demands to grow the business more cost effectively, however, called for new strategies. Certegy established a team of programmers under Fountain to review and improve application efficiency and then armed them with the power of Strobe. The team focused first on nightly batch jobs. "We pay our vendor a per-month charge for a range of MIPs.   Obviously, the more efficiently we process, the more we can grow our business without increasing costs. " Fountain explains. "We needed to find where we are consuming too much CPU, but without having the right tools, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack."

Senior Programmer/Analyst Tomas Suero couldn’t agree more. "It’s hard to go by hand," he says. "I’d spend a lot of time trying to figure out where to start. I’d have to go through the file buffers, program logs, tables, sorts, and VSAM files, but without a guideline to tell me where most of the time is being spent, I’d only be guessing."

Strobe changed all of that. Unlike most performance management tools available today, Strobe goes beyond the surface. It drills through the multiple layers of the system and subsystem infrastructure to measure batch and online activity as an application executes, highlighting areas of resource demand quickly. "That’s the beauty of Strobe," states Suero. "Strobe pinpoints the particular line of code. It tells you the subroutine, the file reference name and the percentage, too. If you go to iStrobe (a web server application for analyzing Strobe application performance data), it’s even better. You get to see the whole line."

Timing Is Everything

In eight months of using Strobe, Certegy’s Support team has made significant strides in runtime. Take, for instance, posting transactions to cardholders’ accounts. This involved a large mainframe program that ran 45 minutes per day. Using Strobe, Certegy cut runtime to 15 minutes a day--a 67 percent improvement. "In another batch program, we made a minor adjustment and went from 225 minutes of elapsed time and 179 seconds of CPU time to three minutes of elapsed time and .89 seconds of CPU time," states Fountain. "That’s a 99.5 percent improvement on one job."

Time savings like these translated into meeting service level agreements. Certegy’s customer service department, for example, expects online applications to be up and running daily by 7 a.m. If nightly batch processing runs too long, however, customer service reps can’t access the applications they need to do their jobs. "With Strobe, we’ve identified more and more runtime improvements and that allows us to make certain our files are available to our clients at a certain time everyday," explains Fountain. "My group is the first to hear when there are problems with response times or availability. Since we’ve used Strobe, we hear about fewer problems. That means our end users are seeing quicker response time and quicker online availability."

So much so, Certegy mandated its development teams to run Strobe with every new application before implementing it in production. Since Strobe and iStrobe don’t require any JCL changes, recompiles, relinks or other application instrumentation and use low-density sampling technology, developers can check runtime improvements sooner. "Our batch jobs don’t run as long, so we can take our time to test properly, instead of throwing something in as a fix," says Fountain. "If problems should occur during our nightly batch processing, we now have more time to react to them."

To date, Certegy has used Strobe to save a total of 10 hours of elapsed time per nightly batch run and two hours of CPU time per day for eight key business programs. "And there’s plenty more opportunity out there," says Fountain. "If you need to get the most out of your mainframe, the best way to improve runtime is to use Strobe. Using Strobe enables us to manage our MIP usage more effectively and grow our business without increasing costs associated with increasing MIPs." 

And plenty of time. "Strobe avoids a lot of trial and error," adds Suero. "I just don’t know how you can drill down to a specific line of code without Strobe … not unless you have magic."