BIAT’s requirements for a 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.

BIAT Finds a Solution with Sun 

BIAT’s process began with decisions on which technologies to use and which vendors to rely on to deliver the solutions in a timely and cost-effective way.

Early on, BIAT was impressed by Sun’s success in migrating many legacy applications from mainframes to UNIX servers, especially large applications and difficult environments. Sun’s products, the Sun Enterprise 10000 server and Sun Mainframe Transaction Processing Software were good matches for BIAT’s needs. A key component of the Mainframe Transaction Processing Software was a Java product that offered a very efficient means to extend BIAT’s applications to the Internet for a complete eBusiness solution to improve customer loyalty. Sun’s software has been used to successfully migrate mission-critical enterprise applications from mainframe systems to open, affordable UNIX systems at more than 600 customer sites worldwide.

“We were impressed by the combination of Sun’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.

BIAT was looking for a reliable means to rehost its large applications in a UNIX hardware environment that offered mainframe-equivalent technology. The banking firm chose a fourprocessor Sun Enterprise 10000 server, which is 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, helping to enable 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.