Insurance Firm Wards Off Costly CPU Upgrades with Compuware Strobe

When the IT members at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company set out to consolidate data centers and convert operating systems for the company’s then six-state service area, they knew the changes would be good for business. What surprised them was how much Compuware Strobe application performance management made a good thing even better. Founded in 1947 by Farm Bureau leaders of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and Texas, Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (SFBCIC) started out as an idea to provide affordable auto insurance to rural farming communities. Today, the company has blossomed into one of the nation’s largest property and casualty insurance companies, with over 2.1 million policies and/or vehicles currently in force. And, there are no signs of business slowing down. As business operations expand, the IT members at SFBCIC look for proven ways to streamline processes, control costs and maintain enduser satisfaction.

Take, for example, the company’s decision to consolidate its data centers and convert its operating system from VSE to the z/OS platform to ensure greater system performance and productivity. "When making modifications to existing applications, every shop can expect performance issues. You can either spend the time and effort identifying and resolving problem areas or continue to throw CPU at the problem," says Joey Brown, SFBCIC Systems Development Manager. "Our goal was to improve performance without incurring extra costs. What we needed was a product to help track down performance issues so we could fix them." As a long-time customer of Compuware mainframe products, SFBCIC turned to the software provider for a solution. As Jane Sullivan, manager of IT Business Services, recalls, "Compuware came in with a demo of Strobe and ran it against our live programs. They were able to pinpoint several areas where we could improve performance with a few simple programming changes. And, they did it so quickly. Strobe was up and running in just a few minutes. We saw high value in such little time—that pretty much sold us on Strobe."

Cost-controlling Coverage

One area the company focused on was its nightly cycles of batch processing. Batch jobs are processed after hours to avoid service disruptions during peak business hours, which mean the system has to process thousands of transactions before the first user logs on the next day. When you consolidate seven different locations into one data center, more data is moving through the system in the same amount of time, which slows processing down. "Sometimes we would be finishing our night cycles only 30 minutes before people came to work the next morning," Sullivan says. "When we ran Strobe against our code, our programmers quickly located the problem. Once they made the fix, batch processing went from two and a half hours down to 45 minutes."

Eliminating inefficiencies like these have translated into bottom-line impacts. Prior to the purchase of Strobe, SFBCIC saw CPU usage growing at an alarming rate. The company was upgrading CPU every six to eight months. Once it implemented Strobe, though, all that changed. Unlike other performance management tools, Strobe drills through the multiple layers of z/OS applications as they execute to spot the exact causes of resource demand. "Strobe pinpoints inefficiencies down to the line of code. Because Strobe quickly pinpoints what’s causing the issue, you don’t spend many, many man hours figuring out where it is. It saved us a ton of time and effort," says Sullivan. "With Strobe, we were able to fine-tune performance and delay our next CPU upgrade for almost 18 months, saving approximately $2 million in hardware and software costs."

Maximized IT Assets, Long-term Benefits

Today, SFBCIC uses Strobe every day to help find bottlenecks and other inefficiencies in its code. Because Strobe requires no JCL changes, recompiles, relinks or other application instrumentation, and uses low-density-technology sampling, IT teams can apply it in both development and testing to eliminate application inefficiencies sooner. According to Brown, that’s part of its appeal. "Our companies are using Strobe in different ways. In some cases, every time a program gets changed, we Strobe it before it goes back into production. In other cases, we use it to troubleshoot applications once issues are identified. Strobe is really the best product we’ve found to help us respond quickly to bottlenecks and response-time issues and keep our applications up longer."

Daily usage of Strobe continues to pay off for the company. Since finishing its consolidation and conversion project nearly two years ago, SFBCIC has initiated a CPU upgrade only once. "We’re running approximately the same number of MIPS for the last 20 months. With Strobe, we can improve performance and put off other upgrades, saving us today probably close to around another $1 million in costs," says Sullivan. "To me, it’s a no-brainer," Brown adds. "If you can improve your performance, you can contain hardware and software costs. Strobe is the best tool on the market to do that, and we hope to have it in our shop for a very long time to come."

With Strobe, we were able to fine-tune performance and delay our next CPU upgrade for almost 18 months, saving approximately $2 million in hardware and software costs.

— Jane Sullivan, IT Business Services Manager, SFBCIC