Fall 2006 - HP NonStop - Hewlett Packard

24x7
F a l l 2 0 0 6
T h e W o r l d o f I n t e g r i t y N o n S t o p C o m p u t i n g
An
Enlightened
View
Beyond facts and data:
The power of
business intelligence
PLUS:
Integrity NonStop system and KDDI
answer subscribers’ call
Quadrant: Risk management
right out of the box
Database expert WinterCorp
on BI’s critical role

24x7
t h e W O R L D o f I n t e g r i t y n o n s t o p c o m p u t i n g
F all 2006
FEATURE
26 An enlightened view
Distinguished technologist Greg Battas
sheds light on business intelligence
POINT OF VIEW
34
What you
need to know
Q&A with database expert Richard Winter
regarding business intelligence
40 Visibility for all
Rich Ghiossi discusses how HP is
changing the BI landscape
TECHNOLOGY
UPDATE
9
Forward-looking strategy for
Change, choice, and
investment protection
HP NonStop technology
26
34
9
12 Silicon giant
New Intel ® Itanium ® processor tops
1.7 billion transistors
14
The heart of the
Adaptive Enterprise
NonStop SQL delivers all the capabilities
expected from an adaptive infrastructure
o n th e c o v e r
Greg Battas, HP distinguished technologist
and program architect
Photograph by Erik Butler
f a l l 2 0 0 6 |

CONTENTS
24x7
t h e W O R L D o f I n t e g r i t y n o n s t o p c o m p u t i n g
COLUMNS
6
5 At issue
Turning vision into reality with BI—
a letter from Scott Stallard, senior VP
and general manager, HP Enterprise
Storage & Servers Division
6 World report
Integrity NonStop system momentum:
■
■
■
■
CEKAB, Sweden
Chicago Mercantile Exchange,
United States
Military Manpower Administration,
South Korea
Dertour, Germany
56 More information
■
■
■
ITUG, the global HP user
community
Subscribe to 24x7
Index of advertisers
16
STRATEGIC
PARTNERS
16 Taking the bite out
of compliance
Quadrant Risk Management puts
Basel II in its place
18 Actionable insight
Retail environment gains an edge with
TransAccess from afterBOT
20 The quintessential
data hub
Multiple industries look to Opsol Integrators
for business intelligence
22 Business in the
here and now
GoldenGate TDM solutions deliver real-time
access to real-time information
6
6
To view the online version of 24x7, go to hp.com/go/24x7. If you are interested
in 24x7 sponsorship, contact barbara.erichsen@hp.com. For more information
on HP Integrity NonStop servers, go to hp.com/go/nonstop.
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CUSTOMER
SUCCESS
44 First come,
first server
Bank-Verlag leads the way in deployment
of next-generation system
46 Strategy and speed
KDDI takes Japan’s mobile messaging
market by storm
48 Twice as much for
the same price
Rabobank set to improve availability and
reduce costs with HP Integrity NonStop
platform
52 Service with
a sonrisa
EVERTEC enables single customer view
for Banco Popular de Puerto Rico
To read about other NonStop computing
successes, visit www.hp.com/go/nonstop
and click Customer References.
18
24x7 magazine is published by
Hewlett-Packard Company
10555 Ridgeview Court
Cupertino, CA 95014 USA
Managing Editor: Sharon Wilkerson
Editorial Development Manager:
Barbara Erichsen
Copy Writer: Gail Garabedian
Copy Editor: Denise Griffiths
Creative Director: Karen von Felten
Publisher: Harding Marketing
377 South Daniel Way
San Jose, CA 95128
+1 (408) 345 4545
www.hardingmarketing.com
46
48
52
© 2006 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such
products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for
technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Inside, the Intel Inside logo, Intel Xeon,
and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and
other countries. Java is a U.S. trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Microsoft, Windows, and Windows NT are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered U.S.
trademark of Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, California. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
Printed in the U.S.A.
4AA0-7622ENW, 10/2006
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HP congratulates Sprint
and NonStop SQL
DM Review, a SourceMedia publication and the
premier source for business intelligence, analytics,
integration, and data warehousing, selected Sprint’s
operational data store (ODS) implementation as the
2006 World Class Solution Award winner in the High
Availability, Performance, and Systems Management
category.
The Sprint ODS solution—based on the HP
NonStop SQL database management system—helps
Sprint effectively manage its enormous data volume,
turning it into an asset for addressing new
marketing demands and solidifying the company’s
leading position in the telecommunications market.
Instantaneous access to and analysis of data, followed
by the appropriate real-time response, has
led to significant improvements in customer service,
fraud detection, and bandwidth management.
Other advantages include enhanced regulatory
compliance, streamlined operations, and increased
network availability.
Sprint ODS has helped transform Sprint into an
Adaptive Enterprise, with the flexibility and speed to
address changing market demands. It is an essential
tool, today and in the future, in optimizing the Sprint
network and delivering outstanding new services,
customer care, and value.
© 2006 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.

at issue
Turning vision into reality with BI
Iam thrilled to introduce this issue of 24x7 because it focuses squarely on the exciting world
of business intelligence. HP has long played an important role in the BI arena, with a full range
of powerful servers, leading database technology, and strong alliances with such industry giants
as Microsoft and Oracle. Now, further validating our commitment to match the appropriate
solution to each unique business challenge, HP has expanded its BI portfolio to offer customers
even greater choice. The new addition, the HP Neoview platform, brings together best-of-breed
technology from across the company to deliver high-end enterprise data warehouse capabilities
at appliance prices.
Running a business gets more challenging every day, regardless of the
industry you call home. If you’re in retail, you need to process an enormous
number of daily, weekly, and yearly point-of-sale records to determine buying
trends and optimize restocking, product placement, pricing, and inventory.
Healthcare enterprises need to satisfy HIPAA requirements by securely centralizing
patient information and treatment history in a standardized format.
In finance, the ability to create a single view of each customer across all
of the banking channels—providing a complete picture of accounts, balances,
and historical activity—is quickly becoming a business imperative.
Telecommunications providers need to analyze billions of call detail records
to understand calling patterns, recognize fraud, optimize the network, and
determine potential revenue for new services.
Manufacturing, public sector, travel and leisure—no industry is immune
from the challenges posed by growing competition, burgeoning regulatory
requirements, and increasingly sophisticated (and demanding) consumers. To address these
challenges and profit from the opportunities they present, more and more enterprises are turning
to business intelligence systems. Decision-makers at multiple levels need “right time” access to accurate,
consistent, enterprise-wide information in order to win against the competition.
Inside this issue of 24x7, you will find a wide array of BI-related articles. There is an in-depth
interview with Richard Winter, founder of WinterCorp, providing his valued perspective on why
an effective BI system is essential for competitive advantage. Business intelligence solutions
are also featured in key partner articles. An overview of NonStop SQL/MX provides insight into
this market-leading database management system. A conversation with Greg Battas, principal
architect for the HP Neoview platform, helps clarify what business intelligence is all about, why
it’s important to get it right, and how companies can help ensure the success of their BI projects.
Rounding out this extensive BI editorial lineup are customer success stories, an article on NonStop
Enterprise Division strategy, and more.
I hope you find the information in this edition of 24x7 to be informative and helpful in
enhancing the BI strategy within your own organization. As always, HP stands ready with a full
range of products, solutions, and services to help you turn your vision into winning reality.
Sincerely,
Scott Stallard
Senior Vice President and General Manager
Enterprise Storage & Servers Division, HP
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world report
Integrity NonStop system momentum
Point of sale gets even better
[CEKAB, Sweden] Stockholm-based CEKAB,
a national Swedish point-of-sale (POS) and
ATM switch, has relied on the HP NonStop
server for the past 18 years to handle its most
mission-critical applications. In keeping with
its philosophy of offering ever-improving
customer service, CEKAB recently took a
major step toward increasing the end-to-end
availability of its ACI BASE24 solution. The
aim was to build a continuous availability
solution together with improved disaster
recovery functionality, with an eye to minimizing
planned downtime. Running two production
nodes in parallel (active-active) gives
CEKAB the ability to offer true 24x7 service.
“For CEKAB, low total cost of
ownership and continuous availability
are the most compelling
features of the Integrity NonStop
system–based solution.”
Sissel Johnsen, manager of production
and operations, CEKAB
Until recently, the POS/ATM application
ran on a single HP NonStop S86008 server;
now it will run on two 4-processor HP
Integrity NonStop NS16000 servers in a Dual
Modular Redundancy (DMR) configuration,
with GoldenGate software replicating data
between the production nodes. CEKAB will
continue to use existing HP Atalla network
security processors and will take advantage
of the Proactive Service package from HP
Services. “For CEKAB, low total cost of ownership
and continuous availability are the most
compelling features of the Integrity NonStop
system–based solution,” said Sissel Johnsen,
CEKAB’s manager of production and operations.
“We view HP as a strategic technology
partner, and we are pleased to have Sweden’s
first continuous availability solution on the
new Integrity NonStop server.” ◆
Speed, throughput,
and performance
[CME, United States] The Chicago Mercantile
Exchange offers the widest range of benchmark
financial products available on any
exchange, traded via the CME Globex electronic
trading platform and its traditional
open-outcry markets. CME previously used
HP NonStop S-series servers in various production
and disaster recovery capacities.
Today the exchange is replacing its entire
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Integrity NonStop and Integrity
Superdome servers—together with
high-end HP StorageWorks XP SAN
storage—create a powerful system
that can meet MMA’s needs for
many years to come.
production environment with the new HP
Integrity NonStop platform. The first server
went online in December 2005, making
CME the first North American customer to
move the Integrity NonStop server into production,
and the first customer worldwide
to deploy the Triple Modular Redundancy
(TMR) option for 99.99999 percent application
availability.
John Hart, director of Technology
Engineering at CME, is pleased with the
results so far. “We chose the Integrity NonStop
server for three reasons: speed, throughput,
“As far as total throughput
is concerned, we’re not
really sure what that is
yet, because we’ve pushed
the system as hard as we
can and have yet to find
the limit.”
John Hart, director of Technology
Engineering, CME
and performance,” he said. “We look at performance
in a couple different dimensions.
One is latency—how many milliseconds
from the time we put an order in the front
end of our system until we get a response
back out. Latency has been reduced by
approximately 35 percent with the Integrity
NonStop server, and I believe we’ll see even
greater reduction once our system tuning is
complete. As far as total throughput is concerned,
we’re not really sure what that is yet,
because we’ve pushed the system as hard as
we can and have yet to find the limit.”
“The reliability of the NonStop servers has
been a key factor in the growth of our electronic
markets,” said Jim Krause, managing
director and CIO at the exchange. “In this
business, you don’t like to see your name
in the paper because a computer problem
has shut the markets down prematurely. The
continuous availability of the NonStop platform
reduces that concern for us. And we
expect that the Triple Modular Redundancy
and enhanced performance of the new HP
Integrity NonStop server will make the CME
story even better.” ◆
Massive database consolidation
[MMA, South Korea] Military Manpower
Administration (MMA) is responsible for
keeping track of military service information
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The goal is to support the massive, real-time
database management that MMA requires for
its next-generation service. Integrity NonStop
and Integrity Superdome servers—together
with high-end HP StorageWorks XP SAN storage—create
a powerful system that can meet
MMA’s needs for many years to come. ◆
Modernized reservations system
Dertour is pleased that this powerful
new server is now available to support
its aggressive growth strategy
in the highly competitive travel and
leisure industry.
in South Korea, and it has counted on HP
NonStop technology to support this missioncritical
task since 1984. A few years ago, MMA
moved the application to an open, industrystandard
Java and Web-based environment
with the purchase of HP NonStop S74000 and
S7400 servers for its headquarters facility and
13 branch offices. Now the time has come for
the next step: a massive consolidation of data
from the 14 distributed systems into a single
HP NonStop SQL/MX database running on
the HP Integrity NonStop platform.
MMA boasts the first Integrity NonStop
server implementation in Korea, but the
excitement doesn’t stop there. In another
“first” for the region, the ultimate solution
will take advantage of not one but two highend
HP systems. The next phase of the project
will involve a 16-processor HP Integrity
Superdome server, which will be used to run
BEA Business Process Management (BPM)
software. This hybrid solution will also leverage
multiple HP ProLiant (DL380) and other
(HP Integrity rx8620; HP 9000 rp7420, rp4440,
and rp4410) servers.
[Dertour, Germany] As the third-largest tour
operator in Germany, Deutsches Reisebüro
GmbH (Dertour) is eager to expand its
business. The company’s growth strategy
includes a plan to modernize its core
applications and move in the direction of
a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). To
that end, Dertour recently took a major step
toward revitalizing its reservations system
with the purchase of two 6-processor HP
Integrity NonStop NS16000 servers with Dual
Modular Redundancy (DMR).
Integrity NonStop servers, based on the
industry-standard Intel ® Itanium ® 2 processor,
provide 24x7 availability out-of-the-box,
and offer the best choice for complex and
critical enterprise applications. These servers
deliver mainframe class of service: supporting
large databases for data integration
and driving key applications in high-volume,
continuously available, real-time transaction
environments.
The sale marked the first Integrity NonStop
server deal in Germany. The new platform
gives Dertour a significant competitive
advantage—with its low total cost of ownership,
continuous availability, linear scalability,
mixed-workload capabilities, and online
maintenance. The German company has had
very good experiences with its NonStop servers
over the years and has been looking
forward to the improved price/performance
of the Integrity NonStop platform. Dertour is
pleased that this powerful new server is now
available to support its aggressive growth
strategy in the highly competitive travel and
leisure industry. ◆
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t e c h n o l o g y U p d a t e
Change, choice,
and investment protection
Forward-looking strategy for HP NonStop technology
HP NonStop technology has
always been the best at what
it does: running the most critical
business applications while
maintaining the most stringent
service levels for the world’s
most prestigious enterprise customers.
And now it’s gotten even
better.
The first step was the introduction
of the Integrity NonStop
NS16000 server, built on the
industry-standard Intel ® Itanium ® 2
processor. It delivers a remarkable increase in
price/performance over earlier-generation NonStop
servers, while maintaining the lowest total cost of
ownership (TCO) in the industry for enterpriseclass
systems. The new architecture was designed
to deliver the highest levels of availability, scalability,
and data while also leveraging standardsbased
components for cost savings and investment
protection.
But HP didn’t stop there. Heeding requests from
its customer base for a lower-cost machine, the
company launched the Integrity NonStop NS14000
server. Like the Integrity NonStop NS16000 server,
this system is based on the NonStop Advanced
Architecture (NSAA) and has superior fault-masking
capabilities. It provides the same availability options
at slightly reduced performance levels, and it scales
to 2,040 processors (compared to 4,080 processors
with the Integrity NonStop NS16000 server).
So far, so good. But both of these high-end
offerings are still beyond the reach of many smaller
enterprise customers, not to mention businesses
in emerging economies. It’s not that a 150-bed
hospital has less-critical
applications or that the
emergency services dispatch
center of a small
community requires
lower reliability than its
urban counterparts. But
these users simply do
not need—and therefore
cannot justify—the
power and scale of
a high-end Integrity
NonStop server. So HP
developed an entry-level platform to meet the
needs of these customers: the Integrity NonStop
NS1000 server.
COMPLEMENTARY PATHS
From a strategy standpoint, HP travels two parallel
but complementary paths. On the one hand, the
company is committed to ongoing investment in
core technology, ensuring a solid growth path and
investment protection for existing customers. At the
same time, a growing emphasis on extending core
technology out to broader markets is taking hold.
Nowhere is this dual focus more evident than in
HP’s NonStop server business.
Bob Kossler, who heads up product management
for real-time platform development in HP
NonStop systems, points to the Integrity NonStop
NS1000 server as a prime example of the “extending
the core technology” thought. “By leveraging
core technologies developed in other parts of
HP—in particular, the rx2620 processor—we were
able to deliver an entry-level product in less than
six months,” he said. “Because we didn’t have to
f a l l 2 0 0 6 |

invest in developing every part of the system, we
were able to bring the product to market faster
and be more responsive to customer needs and
expectations.”
The Integrity NonStop NS1000 server combines
industry-standard hardware components with
NonStop software advantages to create the NonStop
Value Architecture (NSVA). It provides software
fault tolerance and fault isolation, dynamic workload
balancing, cluster programming transparency,
and a virtual application environment. And it makes
Integrity NonStop technology available to a whole
new set of users and applications.
In financial services, the Integrity NonStop
NS1000 server is ideal for lower-volume payment,
point-of-sale, and electronic funds transfer environments.
For the telecommunications industry,
it offers a low-cost platform for new 3G-based
solutions and an affordable infrastructure component
for countries that are just starting to develop
and grow their telecommunications capabilities.
In healthcare, smaller institutions can now afford
to deploy their mission-critical applications on
a truly fault-tolerant system. In the public sector,
the Integrity NonStop NS1000 server supports
emergency services and extends the market for
digital empowerment solutions. In all industries, it
enables innovative real-time solutions.
there’s more
Adding an entry-level model to the Integrity NonStop
server family clearly made the flagship HP NonStop
technology more accessible and affordable, but
HP wasn’t about to stop there. The next strategic
move was to combine elements of this valuable
intellectual property with commodity hardware and
software to target a very specific market: business
intelligence (BI). The result is the fully contained,
prepackaged HP Neoview platform, which delivers
the performance, scale, and reliability of high-end
BI solutions with the speed and ease of a database
appliance, at a fraction of the cost. There are also
other “best of both worlds” initiatives in progress.
This kind of forward-looking approach permeates
the expanding product strategy of the NonStop
Enterprise Division. “We are actively investing in
future technology,” noted Kossler. “One place
where you can see this strategy at work is in
our open source efforts. We understand that most
developers coming out of the university are trained
“The bottom line is that
customers of every size—
and in every industry—can
now leverage our premier
platforms, technology, and
solutions to help turn their
forward-looking business
vision into reality.”
Bob Kossler, manager,
NonStop Enterprise Division
Product Management
10 | 2 4 x 7

on UNIX ® systems. Our open source efforts will
help customers lower the cost of developing applications
and supporting their systems.”
Technology from the broader HP is also leveraged
to good advantage. One example is the Java
Virtual Machine, which is used to improve performance
in the Integrity NonStop server. In fact, the
NonStop Enterprise Division sources best-of-breed
technology wherever it exists: from its own development
efforts, from other HP divisions, and even
from third-party suppliers. “The idea is to lower the
cost of development in places where it makes sense
to leverage existing components,” said Kossler.
“This frees up additional resources for improving
and innovating our intellectual property to add
greater value for our customers.”
Along the same lines, the Integrity NonStop
NS16000, NS14000, and NS1000 servers are based
on designs from the HP Integrity server line, modified
to improve availability, scale, and data integrity.
NonStop servers have made extensive use
of HP StorageWorks disk technology with the XP
Enterprise Storage Array and off-the-shelf Fibre
Channel disk modules, while partner technology is
leveraged for virtual tape products.
INCUBATION AND INNOVATION
What’s coming up Continuous improvement in
software and system price/performance. A lot of
work to fully exploit the dual- and quad-core
microprocessor technology that Intel will be providing.
A closer look at enabling integrated payments
and rich digital media. An evaluation of blade
technology for greater application virtualization.
Hybrid “super clusters” that utilize NonStop SQL
as a database engine for multi-tiered environments
and Service-Oriented Architectures. Evolving HP
ServerNet interconnect technology toward remote
direct memory access (RDMA). The list of planned
and “incubating” projects is extensive.
But let’s boil the strategy down to a single sentence:
HP is continuing to innovate in core Integrity
NonStop technology while simultaneously extending
the “NonStop system fundamentals” to the broader
market. A key benefit of this technology—for both
large enterprises with complex data centers and
developing and growing smaller enterprises—is the
ability to deliver, out of the box, the highest level of
standalone application availability and fault tolerance.
The operating system, database, and interconnect
technology is preintegrated on delivery, so it
works immediately with the customer’s application.
This greatly reduces the complexity of delivering
“The idea is to lower the cost of
development in places where it
makes sense to leverage existing
components. This frees up additional
resources for improving
and innovating our intellectual
property to add greater value for
our customers.”
Bob Kossler, manager, NonStop Enterprise
Division Product Management
the highest reliability, availability, and serviceability
(RAS) levels to complex or critical environments.
“For high-end system customers with missioncritical
applications, this strategy translates into
maintaining stringent service levels while protecting
their existing investment,” concluded Kossler.
“For smaller companies and government entities,
emerging economies, and even large enterprise
users with some less-critical applications, it makes
industry-leading fault tolerance much more accessible.
The bottom line is that customers of every
size—and in every industry—can now leverage
our premier platforms, technology, and solutions
to help turn their forward-looking business vision
into reality.” ◆
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 11

t e c h n o l o g y U p d a t e
Silicon giant
New Itanium processor tops 1.7 billion transistors
Intel cofounder Gordon Moore certainly doesn’t
take himself too seriously. Consider the title of his
industry-changing article, which appeared in the
April 19, 1965, issue of Electronics magazine. He
called it “Cramming more components onto integrated
circuits.”
Here’s what Moore had to say back in 1965:
“The complexity for minimum component costs has
increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per
year.… Certainly over the short term, this rate can
be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over
In 1965, Gordon Moore sketched out his prediction
of the pace of silicon technology. Decades later,
Moore’s Law remains true, driven largely by Intel’s
unparalleled silicon expertise.
Copyright © 2005 Intel Corporation.
the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more
uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it
will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.
That means by 1975, the number of components
per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be
65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be
built on a single wafer.”
The recent introduction of the Dual-Core Intel ®
Itanium ® 2 processor doubtless gave Moore a
renewed sense of pride in his company. This
processor line, previously code-named Montecito,
is designed for the most sophisticated missioncritical
computing platforms in the world. Compared
with the existing single-core version, the dual-core,
1.7 billion transistor Montecito processor delivers
twice the performance with a 20 percent reduction
in power consumption. Cache memory has nearly
tripled—from 9 to 24 megabytes—and the number
of threads (related to processing efficiency) has
increased from one to four.
Montecito certainly makes Lisa Graff proud. As
general manager of server platforms at Intel, Graff
is responsible for both Intel Xeon ® and Itanium
processor–based platform management. The recent
launch of this powerful new processor continues
the steep upward trajectory for performance:
With increased transistor counts comes ever-greater
processing power, measured in millions of instructions
per second (MIPS).
But there’s also something new. “Historically,
performance increases have been tied to the frequency
of the processor,” Graff explained. “Intel
has propelled that trend of higher performance,
faster chips, and lower costs by essentially doubling
the number of transistors on the processor every
12 | 2 4 x 7

“Intel has propelled that trend
of higher performance, faster
chips, and lower costs by essentially
doubling the number of transistors on
the processor every 18 to 24 months, just
as Moore’s Law predicted.”
Lisa Graff, Intel general manager of server platforms
18 to 24 months, just as Moore’s Law predicted.
This has resulted in the terrific standards-based
price/performance curve that the computing industry
has enjoyed for tens of years.”
According to Graff, other factors have now come
into play. “Today, we are increasing performance
by adding more cores to each processor, which has
a very important and interesting effect: Not only
does performance go up, but at the same time we
are able to lower overall power consumption for
both the processor and the system. We can also
embed capabilities such as virtualization, security,
manageability, and enhanced cache reliability
directly into the microprocessor.”
For the basic Itanium architecture, Intel worked
closely with HP to create an architecture that was
optimized for high-end computing. The latest multicore
Itanium technology allows users to reap the
benefits of massively parallel computing, enabling
maximum performance for enterprise applications.
“Intel is very excited about our Itanium roadmap,”
said Graff. “Our next Itanium processor,
called Montvale, will come out in 2007. Tukwila is
slated for introduction in 2008; this is a multicore
processor that will provide another huge jump in
performance along with significant memory and
I/O enhancements. After Tukwila, we have yet
another processor in development called Poulson.
We are making a major investment in Itanium
processors, as demonstrated by this very strong
roadmap.” Montecito is scheduled to enter the HP
Integrity NonStop server roadmap in mid-2007.
The investment doesn’t stop there. For example,
the Itanium Solutions Alliance—a global consortium
of industry leaders dedicated to acceleration of
Itanium-based solutions—has publicly committed
to more than $10 billion in research, development,
and marketing through 2010.
The close link to Intel’s aggressive Itanium roadmap
is good news for HP Integrity NonStop server
customers. “I think they’re getting the best of both
worlds,” said Graff. “They can leverage HP’s leading
design capabilities with these incredibly reliable
systems, which the most mission-critical workloads
and applications in the world rely on. And they
don’t need to make any compromise in terms of
the microprocessor. Itanium is especially designed
for high-end applications, exactly the kind that
Integrity NonStop systems target.”
According to Graff, Intel continues to work
closely with HP to understand its systems and
solutions direction; similarly, HP works with Intel
on processor direction. “Intel and HP have had
a long and mutually beneficial relationship,” she
concluded. “This level of collaboration enables us
to embed capabilities in the processor that HP can
use directly to enhance the system and meet the
mission-critical needs of its customers. It’s a great
approach to putting a high-performance, highcapability
solution together.”
As Gordon Moore so cogently
stated in his February 2003
speech to the International
Solid-State Circuits Conference:
“There is certainly no end to
creativity.” The fruitful alliance
between HP and Intel—and the
remarkable innovation it delivers
on an ongoing basis—bears
out this assertion. ◆
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 13

t e c h n o l o g y U p d a t e
The heart of the
Adaptive Enterprise
NonStop SQL delivers all the capabilities expected
from an adaptive infrastructure
Today, corporations are faced with worldwide
competition in a rapidly changing business environment.
The company that can react the fastest
to change, that understands its customers the best,
and that runs most efficiently will win in this new
business landscape.
The companies that are winning today use IT to
gain visibility into relevant events that are taking
place (both inside and outside their organizations)
and to determine which of these events are important
to their ongoing success. Even more important,
IT helps the companies react in time to take advantage
of opportunities or correct problems instantly.
An “operational” business intelligence (BI) system
can help provide critical information in time for
the decision to matter—whether that’s seconds,
minutes, or hours after the data is received. HP
NonStop SQL is the kind of database that can make
a BI system successful for the Adaptive Enterprise.
A critical enabler for an effective BI implementation
is computing technology that can:
■ Process thousands of transactional events per
second, from a global set of operational systems
■ Recognize events that must be acted on
■ Initiate the right sequence of activities at the
right time
■ Do all of the above on a 24x7 basis
The right database for the job
The heart of any such system is its database. In the
past, databases could either be very good at highupdate
transaction processing or excel at read-only
business intelligence solutions. Try to combine both
types of applications—reading and writing the same
data—and the result would be erratic response times
for transaction processing and suboptimal query
response times. The Adaptive Enterprise requires a
new kind of database management system (DBMS)
that can simultaneously handle massive transactional
work, large strategic queries, and quick-response
operational queries. NonStop SQL is the first DBMS
that excels at this multifaceted processing mix.
NonStop SQL is integrated with, and takes full
advantage of, the real-time online transaction processing
(OLTP) and massively parallel processing
(MPP) power provided by the parallel hardware
and software of the HP Integrity NonStop system.
It is unique in its ability to prioritize the complex
demands on the DBMS from OLTP, queries, loads,
and online maintenance. No other DBMS has demonstrated
this level of success in this type of mixed
processing environment.
For instance, HP uses NonStop SQL in its central
Integration Hub. This real-time DBMS is constantly
updated by hundreds of transactional application
systems worldwide. At the same time, rules-based
engines analyze incoming transaction events and
combine them with historical transaction information
to determine the need for a real-time reaction.
Managers are immediately notified of urgent events
from anywhere in the world, as they happen.
Significant querying of the combined data from
all these transactional systems is done simultaneously
with all of the real-time updates. Queries that
would have required tens or hundreds of messages
to and from remote systems can now be done with
a simple “select” statement.
The hub also maintains running totals of critical
operational statistics (usually on a separate operational
data store, or ODS). The rules are applied to
these running totals to detect trends that require
attention and to view a current “snapshot” of the
entire worldwide supply chain.
Massive linear scalability is a proven characteristic
of the NonStop SQL system. A particularly demanding
benchmark required the system to insert 4 billion
rows of new data in a 24-hour period, while running
thousands of large and small queries. NonStop SQL
was the only system to successfully complete the
benchmark. This demonstrated its ability to deliver
unequaled levels of data availability and performance
for the most demanding applications with
very large, multi-terabyte databases. NonStop SQL
is the only standards-based enterprise DBMS specifically
designed for a clustered architecture, using a
shared-nothing architecture that prevents bottlenecks
when processing high volumes of database queries.
In 2005, the high-profile Winter TopTen Program
recognized NonStop SQL database implementations
from both Sprint and HP with prestigious
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awards. Sprint was named the first-place winner
for the largest database as measured by row count;
its NonStop SQL database comprises more than
2.8 trillion rows. And HP’s own Integration Hub
supply-chain management solution was honored
with awards for both peak workload and normalized
data volume. Based on NonStop SQL software,
the HP Integration Hub solution centralizes key
business data to provide a consistent, integrated
view of the entire supply chain with subsecond
response time. HP and Sprint are in the vanguard of
a significant number of corporations that are using
NonStop SQL at the core of their IT strategies.
Better-than-ever SQL
The latest version of the NonStop SQL database‐—
NonStop SQL/MX—goes beyond its predecessor in
several important areas. It includes many features
that enhance programmer productivity and facilitate
the porting of applications to and from other database
systems. The features provide very close source
code and compatibility with “merchant” DBMSs,
facilitating the conversion of applications from those
environments to NonStop SQL/MX. Corporations
that have reached the limit of their current DBMS
can now move to NonStop SQL/MX more practically
and easily. In fact, anyone who is licensed for
the earlier NonStop SQL/MP version of the software
is automatically licensed for NonStop SQL/MX.
NonStop SQL/MX is a dynamic product.
Traditional system users who move to NonStop
SQL/MX will benefit from the rapid evolution of
its performance and feature set. The product will
continue to deliver significant new enhancements
in online manageability, even greater source-level
compatibility with merchant database management
systems, and increased support for unstructured
binary and character data.
Continuous software quality improvement is also
a major focus, and the news on this front is positive.
“Stronger development processes, combined with
enhanced testing and verification programs, have led
to very good quality for NonStop SQL/MX,” noted
Tim Keefauver, HP NonStop Enterprise Division
director of software product management.
NonStop SQL/MX is the mainstream database
product for the future of Integrity NonStop servers.
It continues the NonStop SQL trend of aligning with
industry standards, and it facilitates the porting of
applications to the NonStop and Integrity NonStop
platforms. And, as part of the all-important BI system
that enterprises now depend on for competitive
advantage, it delivers the availability, scalability, performance,
and flexibility to get the job done right. ◆
Productivity, porting, and performance
NonStop SQL/MX delivers its advanced capabilities via
industry-standard SQL syntax, Data Definition Language
(DDL) manipulation, and other core characteristics. The
following NonStop SQL/MX features enhance programmer
productivity and facilitate application porting:
■ Grant/revoke security enables industry-standard
access of database information.
■ International character sets facilitate global use.
■ Stored procedures allow complex logic to be
written once, stored in the DBMS, and utilized by many
applications.
■ Referential integrity lets the database administrator
define and enforce important relationships between
tables to prevent damage to DBMS integrity.
■ Triggers allow the user to define actions to be taken by
the system when specific values are changed in the DBMS.
■ Hash partitioning leverages parallelism to automatically
balance the database evenly across multiple disk drives.
■ Row sets enhance performance by making it possible
to insert or select multiple rows at a time and to deliver
large numbers of rows to interactive processes running
on other systems in a multi-tier architecture.
■ Publish and subscribe lets the database act as an
agent on the subscriber’s behalf, notifying users when
a “subscribed” event takes place. Leading corporations
and solution providers are building high-performance,
secure, and continuously available business process
integration servers that leverage the intrinsic capabilities
of NonStop SQL/MX.
■ Embedded statistical functions make it easy to
perform sampling and find minimum or maximum values,
standard deviations, moving averages, and more.
■ JDBC Type 4 driver allows client tools or applications
running on another platform to access the database on
the back end (JDBC Type 4 and updated ODBC available
at no added charge).
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 15

S t r a t e g i c P a r t n e r s
“The litany of regulations
just keeps growing.”
Paul Lockyear, CEO, Quadrant
Taking the bite out
of compliance
Quadrant Risk Management
puts Basel II in its place
RRisk. It’s everywhere in the financial services
industry. For example, it includes internally driven
strategic risk, as well as business risk that lies outside
the control of the enterprise. Then there’s market risk,
based on changes in interest, currency, or other market
rates. There’s credit risk, which revolves around
the likelihood of a credit risk exposure being repaid
at a predetermined point in the future. And there’s
operational risk: Will deficiencies in the organization’s
operating infrastructure result in loss to the business
Finally, there’s the ever-present risk to the reputation
of the enterprise, linked to relationships with highprofile
individuals, investor confidence, credit ratings,
and analyst expectations.
Today Basel II has banks thinking hard about risk.
This sweeping accord—which mandates more effective
management of credit, operational, and market
risk across all asset classes—is being implemented
around the world. Compliance with Basel II brings
with it significant benefits, not the least of which
is the possibility of a reduction in the “prudential
capital” that banks must set aside to offset risk
exposure. At the same time, however, compliance
can involve huge costs in terms of money, time,
and resources. A company called Quadrant Risk
Management aims to change all that.
Quadrant was involved in early discussions on
Basel II with the Bank of International Settlement
(BIS). “We noted that there would be significant
commonality across the global banking community
in risk-critical data,” said Quadrant CEO Paul
Lockyear. “We could have treated every bank as a
‘one-off’ development opportunity to turn a gap
analysis into a Basel II risk-critical data repository.
But commercially, we felt there was no justification
in doing so.”
The data model created by Quadrant is essentially
a compliance engine. “Using a broad range
of ETL tools, we can pull any desired risk data into
this model,” continued Lockyear. “Today, Basel II;
tomorrow, Sarbanes-Oxley, Solvency II, the Patriot
Act, and the Markets in Financial Instruments
Directive (MiFID). The litany of regulations just
keeps growing.” The Quadrant data model is a core
element of the preintegrated, prepackaged HP Risk
Management Solution, and runs on multiple HP
platforms including the Integrity NonStop server.
Reality check with BI
The ability to scale the solution with virtually no
performance degradation is critical, according to
Quadrant CTO Jon Simmons. “When a bank starts
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on the process of compliance, it never really knows
how much will be required; the data volumes grow,
the requirements creep. Not having to worry about
the technical infrastructure makes the deployment
of the solution much safer, with less risk for the
future because the platform can expand as the
program evolves.”
The Quadrant data model is closely tied to business
intelligence. “Once you’ve set the expectation
of where you want to go in terms of risk limitation,
you then need to understand whether that actually
happened,” said CEO Lockyear. “That bit about
‘did it actually happen’ is business intelligence. Our
solution supports business intelligence by storing
data at the atomic level with myriad connections to
other data elements.”
Lockyear offers a simple example to illustrate
the point: “Say I’m running a trade finance desk in
a bank and I want to bring in engineering equipment
from another country. As the bank handling
that transaction, I’m going to pick up credit risk
because I am lending money to somebody. I’ll pick
up market risk because I’m going to use a financial
instrument to fund the deal. And I’m picking up
operational risk because the barge that shows up
may be full of rocks and not engineering equipment—in
other words, fraud. I need to understand
the correlation and integration of all the risks, and I
can only do that through business intelligence.”
At the end of the day, risk is unavoidable—but
it doesn’t have to keep financial services executives
awake at night. With the optimal combination
of industry expertise, intellectual property, and
information technology, risk can be effectively mitigated,
managed, and controlled. This is the value
proposition that Quadrant offers, and it couldn’t
come at a better time for the global financial services
community. ◆
“I need to understand the
correlation and integration of all
the risks, and I can only do that
through business intelligence.”
Paul Lockyear, CEO, Quadrant
HP Risk Management Solution
Over the long term, full Basel II adoption calls for a
significant advancement in the way banks identify
and manage the drivers affecting their risk portfolio.
A critical success factor in enabling this advancement
is readily available risk data that is consistent, of high
quality, and (most important) predictive of behavior.
To help banks move up the risk management
sophistication curve, the HP Risk Management
Solution provides a cost-effective, predesigned data
warehouse platform that is ready to meet Basel II
data needs, right out of the box. The solution uses
industry-standard hardware components to significantly
reduce total cost of ownership, as compared
with other compliance solutions currently available
in the marketplace.
The turnkey HP Risk Management Solution enables
ready access to the often disparate, enterprise-wide
information that financial institutions need in order
to meet Basel II requirements. Banks can use their
preferred ETL (extraction, transformation, and load),
business intelligence, and analytics tools with the HP
Risk Management Solution to achieve an integrated,
correlated view of risk across the enterprise. Further,
this solution is easily incorporated into a heterogeneous
computing environment and can evolve as
business and regulatory requirements change.
ffa l l 2 0 0 6 | 17

S t r a t e g i c P a r t n e r s
Actionable
insight
Retail environment gains
an edge with TransAccess
from afterBOT
Quite apart from the technical details
of data organization, messaging, and
reporting, the essence of business
intelligence (BI) is refreshingly simple:
It’s all about delivering meaningful
information on a need-to-know basis
in real time. Enterprises in every industry—from
manufacturing and financial
services to public sector, telecommunications,
travel, and healthcare—are
seeking solutions that can enhance
their business success through instantaneous
access to critical information. For the retail
sector, there’s a solution designed to do just that:
TransAccess from afterBOT, running on the HP
Integrity NonStop server.
According to Jim Nadler, vice president of business
development and marketing at afterBOT,
TransAccess is unique in the industry. “Our solution
takes POS transaction data and transforms
it into a series of actionable insights across the
extended retail enterprise,” he explained. “We put
“Running TransAccess on the
Integrity NonStop platform provides
the optimal solution, with
uninterrupted and real-time access
to the data.”
Jim Nadler, VP of business development
and marketing, afterBOT
the data into a format that is usable by consumers,
internal retail personnel, and the supplier community
through a Web portal application that makes
transaction details available in real time.”
For the consumer, this could mean getting a
digital receipt with direct links to an online warranty
registration process or a product manual.
For the retailer, it could mean quick access to
proofs of purchase for return authorization,
enhanced stock management, or a powerful tool
for measuring marketing promotion effectiveness.
And for the supplier, it could enable a system
of alerts that provide immediate visibility into
product movement, for improved inventory flow.
A collaborative environment
The timing is good for TransAccess. Regulations
like Sarbanes-Oxley have increased the focus on
corporate accountability and fiscal responsibility,
leading to a higher level of collaboration between
retailers and suppliers. “Retailers have historically
been reluctant to share data with their supplier
community,” observed Nadler. “But in reality, retailers
and suppliers are part of a single supply-chain
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link to the consumer, and we see a new openness
starting to evolve. Of course, running TransAccess
on the Integrity NonStop platform provides the
optimal solution, with uninterrupted and real-time
access to the data.”
In today’s demand-driven retail environment,
effective vendor collaboration and customer selfmanagement
depend on 24x7 access to critical
data. Other features are also important: Support for
a mixed workload of online transactions and ad
hoc database queries is imperative, for example, in
order to ensure consistent, high-level performance
and results. With its continuous availability, linear
scalability, transaction and data integrity, and unrivaled
mixed-workload capabilities, the HP Integrity
NonStop server is the optimal platform for the
TransAccess suite of applications.
The strong support for open standards in
the Integrity NonStop platform is good news
for afterBOT. “In the beginning, when we were
trying to sell TransAccess on a NonStop server, we
frankly encountered resistance to the platform,”
recalled Nadler. “It was viewed as proprietary, and
the perceived cost of maintaining a proprietary
system was prohibitive. Moving NonStop systems
to the Intel ® Itanium ® 2 processor and supporting
a wide range of open standards have definitely
changed this perception. Now IT professionals at
the retailer site aren’t restricted to knowing only
the NonStop platform—they can support other
areas as well. This flexibility is important, because
retailers like to leverage their resources across
multiple platforms.”
Partners in excellence
Things don’t stand still in the retail industry, and
afterBOT is already staking out its territory in future
developments. “We plan to engage in an industry
initiative aimed at providing a vendor portal in a
multi-retailer environment,” said Nadler. “This initiative
will have the sales data of multiple retailers going
to a single environment in the supplier community,
in order to improve efficiency and drive in-store
operational excellence. Hopefully, this is another
area in which we’ll be able to partner with HP.”
For now, though, afterBOT is focused on simplifying
business intelligence processes in the
day-to-day life of the retail enterprise. “The goal
is to provide unique views of the data on a needto-know
basis, leveraging the BI environment for
real-time retailing,” concluded Nadler. “This is
where TransAccess on the Integrity NonStop server
can play a pivotal role.” ◆
A single solution, multiple parts
TransAccess includes three portal-based
components:
■ CustomerConnect allows consumers and
business customers to access detailed
transaction history in order to research
past product purchases or additional product
detail, analyze payment history, import
information into money management applications,
and obtain other post-sales customer
services. This always-available information
drives greater customer satisfaction and
helps lower customer service costs.
■ EnterpriseConnect enables internal users to
leverage the data to better manage inventory
levels and product selection, drive promotion
effectiveness, and improve operational
efficiency, while simultaneously delivering
targeted marketing messages based on product
preferences, payment methods, and other
customer-specific buying patterns. Benefits
include fewer out-of-stock situations, lower
customer service costs, and new insight into
sales data.
■ SupplierConnect enables vendor access to
real-time data in order to execute just-in-time
direct store deliveries, comply with trade
allowance policies, and leverage knowledge of
consumer demand signals to better manage
the supply chain. This benefits the retailer by
increasing inventory turnover and lowering
supplier transportation costs.
ffa l l 2 0 0 6 | 19

S t r a t e g i c P a r t n e r s
The
quintessential
data hub
Multiple industries look to Opsol Integrators for
real-time business intelligence
TTo companies worldwide, Opsol Integrators is a
familiar name. Opsol’s flagship Integration Hub
solution is already used for millions of transactions
every day in financial institutions around the globe.
In the United States, the solution’s real-time rules
and transaction routing capabilities help increase
availability, reduce cost, and offload processing
from a major bank’s IBM mainframe. In Mexico, the
Integration Hub plays a key role in a large bank’s
channel integration strategy, resulting in faster processing
times, the elimination of “double postings”
and information latencies, and centralized security.
Clearly, Opsol Integrators is a force to be reckoned
with in the financial services arena.
But Opsol is also well recognized in the healthcare
industry. Its Integration Hub is now being
used in one of the largest healthcare projects in
Germany—actually, one of the largest projects ever
undertaken in the European Union. The solution
integrates 130,000 practitioners, 65,000 dentists,
21,000 pharmacies, and 2,200 hospitals to enable
an integrated, single customer view, as well as handling
the prescription cards for the entire country.
Meanwhile, the Opsol OmniMessaging solution
has been deployed by some of the largest telecommunications
providers in the world. In one case, a
telco using Sun servers faced growing operational
and reliability problems. But OmniMessaging not
only was able to deliver high availability and lower
operational costs, but also helped increase the
subscriber base from a few million to more than
20 million.
The fact is, Opsol solutions are deployed across
industries and geographies. “Opsol is an ISV and
a systems integrator for open systems,” explained
CEO Yash Kapadia. “Our focus is on mission-critical
applications with high transaction volumes, and our
key offering is an Integration Hub that adds value
in multiple industries.” One of Opsol’s most important
products today is the Opsol RTFS Integration
Hub. Based on the HP Real Time Financial Services
(RTFS) framework, it serves as the central “glue”
across all the different banking channels at the
front end and the back-office applications. The
Integration Hub can easily be customized for other
industry verticals as well. Opsol also provides a
security product, OpenCrypto.
A broad layer of services (including professional
services) is part of each Opsol implementation. In
banking, for instance, the Integration Hub is just
part of the story; the messaging solution sends
e-mails from the finance application, while the
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“For us, business intelligence
is a matter of running rules
in real time, being able to
draw on historical data as
well as absolutely current
information, then using this
input to make smart decisions
and provide better value to
the customer.”
Yash Kapadia, CEO, Opsol Integrators
security product handles single sign-on, passwords,
and encryption. In government, the Integration
Hub underpins large databases used for analytics
to track border crossings, stolen cars, and the
like, while a secure version of OmniMessaging
(complete with encryption) virtually eliminates the
risk of compromised data. In telecommunications,
OmniMessaging supports not only short message
service (SMS), voice mail, e-mail, and multimedia
messaging service (MMS), but also mass alarms and
emergency message broadcasts.
Platform of choice
When you see an Opsol solution, it’s safe to assume
that an HP NonStop server is nearby. “We also do
work on the HP-UX platform, and every once in
a while we integrate applications in a Sun environment,”
noted Kapadia. “But our focus is on
applications that either go into or come out of the
NonStop server, for example, to an IBM mainframe.
Normally, the Integration Hub and the NonStop
server are central to our solutions.”
Continued Kapadia, “One of the biggest reasons
we partner with HP, especially the NonStop
Enterprise Division, is because of the company’s
NonStop servers. They have the highest availability—and
we definitely need this continuous
availability for our customer applications. We have
also found our HP counterparts to be very flexible
in terms of support for prototypes, pilots, and
implementations. This support is absolutely critical.”
NonStop system users familiar with HP’s patented
Zero Latency Enterprise (ZLE) architecture
will be pleased to know that Opsol has continued
to enhance this innovative technology—even packaging
industry-specific versions in an easy-to-install
CD format.
New markets
All Opsol solutions have been validated for operation
on the HP Integrity NonStop server, and
Kapadia is pleased with what he’s seen so far: “The
performance of the new platform is significantly
higher, so we are able to run our transactions much
faster. As a result, we can use the extra cycles to
run additional analytics for fraud detection or valueadded
offers. And the improved price/performance
of the new platform brings down the entry price
for our solutions, opening new markets for Opsol
and HP.”
Today, enterprises want to run their analytics
in real time to enable value-adds such as
fraud management, timely customer offers, and
enhanced customer service. By providing business
decision-makers with up-to-the-second information
and a single customer view across the enterprise,
Opsol solutions make it possible to leverage realtime
business intelligence and take the appropriate
action in every customer interaction.
“For us, business intelligence is a matter of running
rules in real time, being able to draw on historical
data as well as absolutely current information,
then using this input to make smart decisions and
provide better value to the customer,” concluded
Kapadia. “We have ‘productized’ our Integration
Hub to make real-time business intelligence even
more accessible. The Integrity NonStop platform
and the Opsol Integration Hub work together to
make this possible.” ◆
“The improved price/performance
of the new platform brings down
the entry price for our solutions,
opening new markets for Opsol
and HP.”
Yash Kapadia, CEO, Opsol Integrators
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 21

S t r a t e g i c P a r t n e r s
Business
in the
here
and now
GoldenGate TDM solutions deliver
real-time access to real-time information
YYou know it yourself. Let the atm take an extra
30 seconds to dispense your cash, and you start to
fidget. Let an online retailer dawdle in displaying
the exact product you’re looking for, and a simple
mouse click takes you straight to a competitor’s site.
There’s no getting around it: Today’s consumers
want what they want, when they want it.
GoldenGate Software, a privately held software
company based in San Francisco, saw this trend
coming. Since its inception in the mid-’90s, the
company has provided solutions that help enable
the responsiveness that today’s competitive marketplace
demands.
GoldenGate focuses on two key areas: high availability
for continuous operation, and real-time data
integration. Key partners include ACI Worldwide
and IDX (now part of GE Healthcare), making
financial services and healthcare the company’s
main markets. But with customer demand for realtime
business intelligence (BI) growing rapidly—
and with the cost of sophisticated BI platforms
declining just as fast—new opportunities in retail,
telecommunications, public sector, e-commerce,
and other sectors are emerging.
“Our key strength lies in providing real-time
data movement in heterogeneous environments,”
said Sami Akbay, vice president of marketing at
GoldenGate. “And while we’re doing that, we
maintain the integrity of the data transactions that
drive mission-critical business processes. People
want real-time access to real-time information, and
that is precisely what our solutions deliver.”
No stopping now
All of the components of GoldenGate’s flagship
Transactional Data Management (TDM) platform—
which supports both key business areas of the
company—are fully operational on the HP Integrity
NonStop server. In fact, many joint customers
have already put this powerful combination into
production.
Product manager Chris McAllister, who oversees
NonStop system–related development and partnerships
at GoldenGate, is excited about this new HP
platform. “More and more enterprise customers
are requiring continuous availability in order to
minimize planned outages,” he said. “When they
have a new application, or a new operating system,
or a database upgrade, they need to keep the
business running while they’re implementing those
system changes. Many customers use GoldenGate
solutions for that capability, and the extraordinary
availability levels possible with the Integrity
NonStop server really complement our TDM offerings.”
The continuous availability of the Integrity
NonStop server also helps fuel a growing interest in
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“BI is no longer a luxury. It is how
you institutionalize knowledge
and how you react to your
customers and partners in a
consistent, intelligent manner.”
Sami Akbay, VP of marketing, GoldenGate
“active-active” configurations for business continuity
and processing efficiency, another area in which
GoldenGate plays a large role.
On the data integration side, GoldenGate focuses
primarily on data warehousing. “In the past, data
warehousing has always meant an ETL-type solution,”
explained McAllister. “At night or over some
specified period of time, the enterprise transferred
its entire database into the data warehouse, performed
some business intelligence operations on it,
and figured out what to do in the next month. But
this approach is becoming less acceptable, because
unless you have real-time data, you’re making
today’s decisions based on yesterday’s information.
Enterprise customers need real-time business intelligence
to support fast, effective decision-making.
GoldenGate TDM solutions running on the Integrity
NonStop server deliver this capability.”
The Integrity NonStop platform’s broad support
of open standards is extremely relevant to
GoldenGate. “Many years ago, the NonStop platform
tended to be isolated from the rest of the IT
infrastructure in many places,” said Akbay. “People
who ran these systems did not really exchange
much data or information. It was essentially an
infrastructure within an infrastructure.”
Now that more solutions are viewed as mission
critical, and because the overall IT environment of
the typical enterprise includes so many different
types of servers and applications, it is crucial for all
key systems to exchange information. “Adoption of
open standards makes it much easier for NonStop
servers—and now the Integrity NonStop server—to
be a part of the larger IT infrastructure, as opposed
to being an isolated pocket within that environment,”
continued Akbay. “Today, customers can
seamlessly exchange data and information between
this powerful, high-end environment and their
open systems environment.”
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 23

Keeping it real
Business intelligence is increasingly important for
the enterprise. “BI is no longer a luxury,” said
Akbay. “It is how you institutionalize knowledge
and how you react to your customers and partners
in a consistent, intelligent manner. Today, BI infrastructures
are becoming real time: It’s not about
what happened yesterday or last week, but what’s
happening right now.”
This real-time visibility provides a wealth of
operational capabilities that can be leveraged by
people across the enterprise, not just business analysts
and “glass house” executives. Ultimately, BI
is the activity of turning data into intelligence, and
real-time information provides a huge advantage in
this environment.
As an increasing amount of information in the
BI framework becomes real time, and as the BI
framework takes on more and more importance
in driving day-to-day operations, it becomes even
more mission critical. GoldenGate is up to the
challenge. “We impose minimal overhead on the
source systems bringing data in,” said Akbay. “We
eliminate the need for batch outages, handle very
high volumes, and support a heterogeneous environment.
The future is all about real time, and
GoldenGate TDM solutions running on the Integrity
NonStop platform add significantly to the overall
value proposition.” ◆
“Enterprise customers need
real-time business intelligence
to support fast, effective
decision-making. GoldenGate
TDM solutions running on
the Integrity NonStop server
deliver this capability.”
Chris McAllister, product manager, GoldenGate
24 | 2 4 x 7

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f E A T U R E s T O R Y
an
Enlightened
view
Distinguished technologist Greg Battas
sheds light on business intelligence
26 | 2 4 x 7

A quiet miracle is unfolding in the world
of enterprise data management. After
decades of maintaining separate and
sometimes even adversarial kingdoms,
business and IT are coming together
in support of a common vision for
the enterprise.
A key catalyst driving this change is business intelligence
(BI). In the past, BI was the purview of a select few:
A relatively small proportion of the company understood
and manipulated the data warehouse, while an equally
finite group leveraged the resulting reports to make business
decisions. Today, by contrast, more and more companies
expect their BI systems to provide accurate, current
information that reflects the reality of the entire enterprise.
And employees at all levels, not just executives, are
accessing the data and using it to drive business success.
Previously tapped for infrequent business decisions, BI is
now routinely leveraged for operational support in a growing
number of enterprises.
Greg Battas, principal architect for the HP Neoview
enterprise data warehouse platform for business intelligence,
has been living and breathing BI for decades under
its earlier guises as decision support systems (DSS), data
warehousing, and the like. In the following interview, he
sheds light on what business intelligence is all about, why
it’s important to get it right, and how companies can help
ensure the success of their BI projects.
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 27

24x7: Let’s start at the beginning. How do
you define business intelligence
Greg Battas: BI has evolved as an umbrella term
that involves a higher-level look at the business. It’s
not so much how you make specific decisions, but
about getting a complete picture: How is my business
performing, both against plan and with respect
to the competition And how do I leverage critical
business information to drive success
In the past, there has been a proliferation of
discrete terms and segments—things like relational
OLAP, data mining, executive information
systems, analytics, and decision support systems—that
touched on or involved different types
of analytics and query processing. BI is the overarching,
business-focused concept that includes
all of these things.
24x7: Does BI help create an environment
in which business and IT work together
more closely
GB: It varies on a company-by-company basis, but
I think we’re seeing a definite shift. Historically,
IT organizations have often set complex standards
“BI can’t be an afterthought.…
To really centralize BI and
make it operational, it needs
to be a core element of the
enterprise strategy and part
of everyone’s mainline job.”
that were sometimes viewed as overly restrictive
by user groups. In response, user groups have
proceeded to build their own data marts and point
solutions. The result has been a sprawl of different
technologies that mainly benefits data mart technology
vendors.
Many companies that I work with today, HP
included, find that this approach is no longer
viable. The user groups are maturing, and they
understand that they need IT’s help to grow; at the
same time, the IT groups are getting more responsive
with their centralized solutions. As companies
move toward greater centralization of BI assets, IT
organizations are aligning themselves more closely
with user requirements. IT is willing to help the
user community implement solutions quickly, while
users recognize that effective BI requires management
beyond the department level. So I think the
two sides are starting to collaborate more closely,
creating an asset that supports the entire enterprise
and is flexible enough to serve the needs of many
different users.
24x7: What other general trends are you
seeing in the BI arena
GB: One is a shift toward highly tuned databases.
Database technology has continued to evolve over
the last few years, offering features designed to
squeeze the last ounce of performance out of existing
systems. This extremely precise tuning does
improve performance, but often at the expense of
flexibility.
Some of the newer players, particularly the
appliance vendors, are approaching the problem
differently: Rather than attack the problem with
really smart software, they do it with a lot of very
cheap hardware. These cost-effective “scale-out”
solutions essentially apply brute force to the database
in what I would consider a paradigm shift.
Some users are incorporating appliances into
the existing BI environment as adjunct systems to
handle specific tasks. Others are seriously considering
full-scale migration to reduce their cost of ownership.
In either case, this low-cost, scale-out approach
offers an interesting alternative to traditional highend
data warehousing.
28 | 2 4 x 7

“BI has evolved as an umbrella
term that involves a higher-level
look at the business. It’s not
so much how you make
specific decisions, but about
getting a complete picture.”
24x7: You’ve said some nice things
about the appliance approach. What’s
the downside
GB: An appliance is exactly that—an approach.
It’s the choice to use a lot of cheap power rather
than optimize the database design, and it works for
point solutions. But this approach is inadequate for
enterprise data management projects.
Additionally, most appliance vendors are startups
with fairly immature technology. They will say that
certain features are unnecessary and add unwanted
complexity to the system—but the real reason is
that they don’t yet offer the features in their own
products. One vendor, for example, claims that you
don’t need to manage materialized views, which
are ways in which the database pre-aggregates and
manages certain data. Interestingly enough, the
company is planning to add this feature in a future
release.
Another issue is that appliances can be extremely
inefficient at certain things, due to the immaturity
of today’s appliance vendors. The whole concept
of an appliance is that it scales out—instead of
one really fast machine, many small computers
are networked together and operate in parallel.
This approach works well in simple cases, such
as table scans.
But the database world is more complex than
that, and it takes years to get good at effectively parallelizing
queries in a scale-out architecture. When
you join tables, for example, the data you need may
no longer be local to your processor. Appliances
are optimized for simple problems, but they lack
the maturity to step into an environment with a
complex data model, a large number of tables, and
multiple user groups sharing the system.
24x7: Does the HP Neoview platform fall
into the scale-out camp
GB: Yes, it does—and no company is in a better
position to create a scale-out solution than HP. We
can build a very low-cost system using our own
off-the-shelf servers and storage, because we sell
these components at incredibly high volumes.
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 29

“I think we’re getting to the point where the hardest part of BI is not
querying the data and getting answers—it’s actually getting the data
to a point where it can be queried.…You have to take raw, messy
data from many different groups, clean it up, transform it, and load
it into the database. Only then can you perform queries and turn the
data into useful, actionable information.”
We’re also in a phenomenal position from a quality
standpoint, because of the amount of hands-on
testing and QA that’s done on these products before
they’re shipped. And we can wrap our systems in
a level of services and tender loving care that most
companies can’t, because we have the services and
support organization to do that.
Finally, through the acquisition of what is now
the NonStop Enterprise Division, we have software
with excellent fault-tolerant capabilities unique to
HP, as well as parallel database technology. We are
in a unique position, with the hardware, servers,
storage, volume shipments, field services, and software
intellectual property to make the HP Neoview
platform a success.
24x7: You said the HP Neoview platform
is priced like an appliance. What makes it
better than an appliance
GB: HP Neoview has several important technological
advantages over appliances. For one thing,
it can do mixed workload. An example would be
performing a large extraction of data while online
users are submitting queries; it’s important to ensure
that excellent response time on one side isn’t
gained at the expense of the other. Mixed workload
is not a trivial capability, and HP Neoview is very
good at it.
We also do high concurrency well. Appliances
are good at running a few queries at a time, but
when you start talking about thousands of users,
30 | 2 4 x 7

that level of concurrency is not easy. It’s a great
thing to be able to throw hundreds of processors
at scanning a table, but if you have thousands of
users, this model may not scale. It may be preferable
to design the table so that it does not have to
be scanned.
Manageability is another critical advantage: HP
Neoview has a mature management infrastructure
that makes it possible to see what’s happening in
the system at any time and to manage the workload
effectively. The appliances do not.
BI: A need for all industries
Who needs business intelligence Short answer:
Everybody. Regardless of industry sector, enterprises
can realize significant competitive advantage by exploiting
their critical data.
24x7: How does the HP Neoview platform
compare to high-end BI offerings
GB: The high-end players clearly have much of the
infrastructure needed for effective, enterprise-class
business intelligence. They’ve been doing it for a
long time, and they do it very well—but they do
it for an unbelievably high price. Customers are
really struggling with the multimillion-dollar costs
required to keep these systems up and running,
and they are all looking for a way to bring their cost
structure down.
The HP Neoview value proposition is to provide
the enterprise-class reliability, manageability, scalability,
and concurrency of the high-end BI offerings
at the price of the Linux-based, clustered commodity
players that are coming into the market.
24x7: What’s the key to a successful
BI project
GB: I think the main driver is motivated support
from the various user groups that are involved.
Typically, a new BI team is created and tasked with
building a data warehouse. They’re sent out to the
different business units to beg for data and quality
fixes. It’s a thankless job, because all these business
units are busy running their own operations and
don’t have time to provide the necessary support.
So I think one of the biggest factors is ensuring that
all affected organizations have a vested interest in
the success of the project.
Also important is having a management style
that says, “We’ll go fast, but we won’t be stupid.” In
many BI projects, there is a tendency to design to
perfection, no matter how long it takes. This is certainly
understandable; the specifications are usually
nebulous at best. You’re building something that
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
Communications. BI enables communications enterprises
to analyze billions of call detail records in order
to understand calling patterns, recognize fraud, optimize
the network, and determine potential revenue for
new services.
Financial services. Financial institutions leverage BI to
create a single view of each customer across all banking
channels, and facilitate compliance with Sarbanes-
Oxley, Basel II, and other requirements.
Healthcare. Healthcare payers and providers use BI to
combine billions of billing and clinical records, including
tests and procedures, diagnoses, and ultimate results,
while simultaneously complying with a growing cadre of
regulatory requirements.
Manufacturing. In manufacturing enterprises, BI is
used to consolidate all pertinent information in the supply
chain, including supplier performance and pricing,
inventories, manufacturing capacity and production
statistics, distribution logistics, warehousing status,
and shipment tracking.
Public sector. BI helps public sector entities support
national security by integrating and analyzing information
on border crossings, watch lists, import shipments,
and purchasing patterns of certain materials.
Retail. To determine buying trends and optimize
restocking, product placement, pricing, and inventory,
retailers rely on BI to process huge volumes of daily,
weekly, and yearly point-of-sale records.
Travel and leisure. Successful campaigns—and the
ability to deliver relevant offers and retain information
for future interactions—leverage BI to store, integrate,
access, and analyze customer demographics, buying
patterns, and credit.
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 31

een the part nobody wants to talk about, the crazy
uncle in the closet. You have to take raw, messy
data from many different groups, clean it up, transform
it, and load it into the database. Only then can
you perform queries and turn the data into useful,
actionable information.
For years the industry has talked about ETL—
extraction, transformation, and load. I think we’re
starting to see a shift toward ELT, where we move
data from another system directly to our system.
Once the data is there, we transform it in place
using the power of this very large parallel machine.
I think there will be an increasing focus on doing
this part better over the next few years. It’s not
glamorous, but it’s what really holds you back from
rolling out new releases of your data warehouse.
“People are beginning to understand
the value of an enterprise
resource that the entire company
can use.”
holds data for the enterprise and that will attempt
to answer any question for anybody at some point
in the future. How do you design for that
It’s often hard for a BI team to be pragmatic,
and just land on a design and move forward. But
if you aren’t willing to push an aggressive timeline
on these projects, they will take too much time and
be overdesigned. A better approach is one that’s
shorter and faster, with iterations to improve the
system in subsequent releases.
24x7: What future developments do you
see in the BI arena
GB: I think we’re getting to the point where the
hardest part of BI is not querying the data and
getting answers—it’s actually getting the data to
a point where it can be queried. This has always
24x7: What’s the main thing that enterprise
customers need to know about BI
GB: People are beginning to understand the value
of an enterprise resource that the entire company
can use. But to create such a resource, BI can’t
be an afterthought. It can’t be a department-level
project. It can’t be relegated to a team that lacks
broad-based support. To really centralize BI and
make it operational, it needs to be a core element
of the enterprise strategy and part of everyone’s
mainline job.
The second point is that reliable, high-level BI
function is now available to a much broader user
community than ever before. It’s no longer just the
biggest, wealthiest companies that can leverage
their business information to make the best possible
operational decisions. New technology makes
it possible to create this integrated view of the business
at commodity-level cost.
But again, process is an absolutely critical part
of the equation: Companies need to think differently
about the way they approach BI in order
to fully exploit the power that’s now available
to them. Decision-makers should ask themselves
what value they would derive from enterprisewide
access to consistent, up-to-date information—
access by employees at every level—and how they
can most effectively move forward to make this
vision a reality. ◆
32 | 2 4 x 7

Greg Battas carries the fellowship-level title of
“distinguished technologist” at HP, where he consults
with the company’s largest customers across
industry segments. He is the creator and program
architect of a unique new solution from HP, which is
designed to change the way businesses approach
enterprise data management projects. Previously,
he spearheaded the company’s entry into DSS/BI,
leading a team that built some of the first very large databases (VLDBs) on
massively parallel processing (MPP) technology. He also coauthored Building the
Operational Data Store with industry legend Bill Inmon.
In 2000, Battas patented a unique approach to accessing critical business
information by decision-makers in near real time, the Zero Latency Enterprise
(ZLE) architecture. HP’s ZLE enables enterprises to remove the latency from
their information flow, making it possible to more effectively manage the supply
chain, streamline business processes, and greatly enhance customer relationship
management (CRM) capabilities.
Since graduating from Indiana University with a Bachelor of Science degree
in Decision Sciences, Battas has been at the leading edge of pivotal IT trends,
including client/server, DSS, BI, and real-time computing for HP.
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 33

p o i n t o f v i e w
What
you need to know
Q&A with database expert Richard Winter
regarding business intelligence
WWhen it comes to business intelligence (bi) on a
grand scale, Richard Winter has been there and
back. He founded (and now runs) a company,
WinterCorp, to help enterprises solve the thorniest
BI problems in scalability, performance, availability,
architecture, and manageability. He conducts
extensive primary research on the practices of those
who are building and managing the world’s largest
databases, revealing their configurations, dimensions,
issues, goals, successes, and obstacles.
Earlier in his career, Winter helped create the
Model 204 database engine for online complex
interactive query, which was the leading product
for large-scale complex query for several years, and
the platform for many early systems that would now
be called data warehouses. He also participated in
seminal DARPA-funded research on architectures
for data management and data sharing across the
Arpanet, predecessor to today’s Internet.
So when 24x7 went looking for an expert to
discuss this rapidly evolving domain, Richard
Winter topped the list. In the following interview,
Winter shares his insight and perspective on
the critical role of business intelligence in today’s
data-rich and increasingly competitive enterprise
environment.
24x7: Let’s start at the beginning. How do
you define business intelligence
Richard Winter: BI means making information
accessible to people who need to make decisions on
behalf of an enterprise
in a timely, accurate,
consistent, integrated,
and easy manner. When
you can deliver the
required information in
response to interactive
queries that may not
have been anticipated,
as well as through
solutions that solve
specific recurring problems
in the business,
then you have a BI
capability.
Data can now be integrated
across the enterprise
as well as across
the full range of subjects
that the enterprise
deals with. It’s extraordinarily powerful to have
information on every aspect of the business—
customers, products, suppliers, finances,
human resources, competition—in one integrated
repository or available through one
seamless user interface. The ability to do this
quickly and cost-effectively and to create and
deliver new business solutions that exploit
the data for analytic and decision-making
purposes are ideas that have become achievable
for enterprise users only recently.
34 | 2 4 x 7

“BI connotes something beyond
facts and data. The focus is on
information that can be applied
to produce business insight or
business action.”
24x7: How is BI different from traditional
data warehousing and decision support
RW: BI connotes something beyond facts and data.
The focus is on information that can be applied to
produce business insight or business action. In the
early days of data warehousing, the miracle was that
retail managers could receive a set of sales reports
on Monday morning that were accurate, that were
consistent across hundreds or thousands of stores,
and that could be aggregated to satisfy every level
of management and executive interest.
But the manager’s job is not just to know what
happened over the weekend. It’s to make the right
decisions on Monday morning so that the business
progresses over the coming days, weeks, and
months. To make effective decisions, the manager
must be able to understand what is likely to happen,
and then determine the actions that will best
take advantage of future opportunities. Today BI
means that the system and its related applications
will help the enterprise react to—and capitalize
on—dynamic business conditions.
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 35

“You want a platform that can
scale, because nearly everything
in BI starts small but can
get very large.”
24x7: What key trends do you see in BI at
this time
RW: One consequence of the ongoing IT revolution
is that devices that capture data have become
less and less expensive to produce. Radio frequency
identification (RFID) is a good example. An
RFID tag attached to a product can report wirelessly
the location of the product as it moves through
the supply chain. These tags are being attached
to cartons and pallets at the point of origin, and
they’re allowing retailers to track the movement
of goods toward the point of delivery. In the past,
this information would have been very costly to
capture for every item that moved through a huge
retail operation.
Of course, each transmission from an RFID tag
generates a record that ends up in a data warehouse
and can be used for analysis concerning the efficiency
of the distribution system, how effectively
stores are being stocked, how well suppliers are
meeting their deadlines, and many other questions
that might have been too expensive to answer in
the past.
This creates a challenge in terms of very rapidly
growing volumes of data in data warehouses. In
fact, our research shows that in each of the last
three 2-year periods, the size of the largest data
warehouse in the world has tripled. In that 6-year
period, we moved from an era in which the largest
data warehouses were a few terabytes. In 2005 the
largest database was 100 terabytes of data; soon
we’ll be at 1,000 terabytes, or a petabyte. Businesses
need effective ways to manage all that data.
24x7: How can enterprises deal with this
explosion in data
RW: You need a scalable database platform and
design in order to ensure that increasing data
volumes—as well as growing user populations
and heavier workloads—won’t max out your data
warehouse. Such scalability must be systematically
engineered into your BI infrastructure and then
proactively managed as usage grows and requirements
change throughout the system life cycle.
But the effort yields rich rewards. In our consulting
engagements, we’ve seen how a scalable BI
infrastructure can enable enterprises to successfully
roll out a new product across thousands of stores,
launch a multichannel strategy to enter new markets,
and accomplish other crucial growth initiatives
without disrupting existing operations.
36 | 2 4 x 7

“Today BI means that the system
and its related applications will
help the enterprise react to—and
capitalize on—dynamic business
conditions.”
24x7: Where do the new data warehouse
appliances fit into the BI market
RW: The idea of an appliance is to make it very
simple for the customer by packaging everything
you need for a data warehouse into a single unit.
When the client buys an appliance, all required
hardware and software arrives preintegrated, preinstalled,
and preconfigured. In principle, it’s wheeled
into the office or computer room, plugged into the
network, and the client can start loading data.
The design goal for appliances is that they
be easy to acquire, install, and use. They should
deliver high performance as a result of their integration
and their use of commodity hardware and
The world’s largest databases have tripled
in size every two years since 1999 according
to the recent WinterCorp TopTen Program,
which surveys the biggest, most heavily used
databases.
software components,
and they should be
easy to maintain. The
movement toward the
appliance concept is an
effort to make BI simpler, faster, and less expensive.
To the extent that these goals can be met and
the promise delivered on, I think customers will be
very interested.
24x7: What key factors should an enterprise
consider in designing and implementing a
BI system
RW: At the root of the design challenge are the
business requirements for the system. The business
goals might be to improve customer satisfaction,
raise revenues, acquire more profitable customers,
or enhance efficiency. Whatever they are, these
goals need to be clear and shared by the enterprise,
and then the system must be designed to satisfy
those objectives.
Concrete business goals must feed into clearly
defined engineering requirements for the data
warehouse. These requirements are typically quite
demanding in terms of response time, performance,
data freshness, scalability, and availability—and
defining them requires some hard thinking and
expert analysis. But by making them unambiguous
and quantitative, the enterprise can ensure a design
and implementation process that recognizes key
risks and resolves them early and successfully.
It also pays to run tests early that realistically and
sufficiently explore the engineering requirements
that the system will face in production. Time and
again in helping our clients conduct such tests,
we’ve seen leading enterprises control major business
risks and save millions of dollars—and months
of implementation time—by doing the right type of
testing early in the process.
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 37

24x7: What are the most important characteristics
of the platform that underpins
an effective BI system
RW: You want a platform that can scale, because
nearly everything in BI starts small but can get very
large. If you want to provide inventory management
in a chain of hundreds or thousands of stores,
usually you start out providing it for a few stores.
The worst nightmare would be to launch a system,
make a big splash with a successful 10-store pilot,
and then find that your system has run out of capacity
as you roll out
to your remaining
stores. This kind
of thing can happen when projects are undertaken
without a scalable platform underneath or without
a scalable database design.
In addition to being scalable, the platform has
to perform. It must be able to respond rapidly to a
wide range of queries that can be simple or complex,
and it must be able to incorporate new information
rapidly. Of course the platform also has to
be available; as BI has progressed to support more
and more business-critical activities, we’ve moved
into an era in which the data warehouse has to be
available 24x7 in many organizations. The ability to
provide continuous operation is critical.
24x7: What challenges do enterprises face
in implementing a BI system
RW: The fundamental challenge lies in managing a
dynamic environment in which requirements escalate
rapidly with respect to scale, complexity, availability,
data latency, and other factors.
For example, a financial institution might
want its call center agents to start crossselling
to customers who have called in
for service. These agents have the customer
on the phone, have just helped
the customer, know something specific
about the customer’s needs (two children
in college, for instance), and have
products available that might help.
This is a magic moment. But having a BI system
that can analyze callers’ specific needs and provide
answers in near real time to thousands of agents is
a very demanding requirement.
Data warehouse managers are sometimes asked
to develop such capabilities quickly and make the
new system available across an enormous enterprise.
This can entail a major expansion of the data
warehouse platform. So that’s the kind of challenge
customers face: the need to respond quickly to
new business requirements that rapidly increase
the scale and complexity of the data warehouse
operation.
24x7: You’ve mentioned retail and
financial services. Is BI valuable in other
industries as well
RW: Absolutely. Any enterprise, regardless of industry,
will enjoy greater success to the extent that it is
able to leverage its customer and operational data
to improve business decision-making. In manufacturing,
BI has been successfully applied in the area
of supply-chain management. Having visibility all
along the supply chain—with atomic-level data on
every vendor, order, part or commodity, raw material,
price, and delivery status—makes it possible to
have the right product at the right price at the right
time for manufacturing.
BI is involved in healthcare. For example, it can
help providers deliver care for chronic conditions in
38 | 2 4 x 7

“As BI has progressed to support more and more business-
critical activities, we’ve moved into an era in which the data
warehouse has to be available 24x7 in many organizations.
The ability to provide continuous operation is critical.”
a consistent, medically effective, and cost-effective
way. People are treated for high blood pressure,
diabetes, and heart disease over decades, and there
are enormous differences in the practices used
from one doctor or hospital to another. BI helps
employers, insurers, payers, and
providers identify best practices
for delivering high-quality care
without wasting money.
In telecommunications, churn
is a big issue. Creating strategies
that enable telecommunications
providers to acquire and
retain profitable customers is a
major focus area for BI in telecommunications.
In the public
sector, BI makes it possible to
service citizens efficiently and
cost-effectively. In law enforcement,
BI enables integration
of information from multiple
sources to optimize resource
allocation and criminal investigation.
Fraud is a huge
problem in public sector programs
that involve payments,
and BI has been very effective
in these areas. There are many
more examples across the full
range of industry sectors.
24x7: How can an enterprise
measure the success
of its BI system
RW: There are two basic
domains of measurement:
technical and business. On the
technical side, you need key
performance indicators that are
aligned with the requirements
for the data warehouse. These
might measure such things as
data latency, query response
time, and availability.
Richard Winter is president
of WinterCorp, an independent
consulting firm that helps
enterprises increase the
performance, scalability,
and value of terabyte-scale
databases. Founded in 1992,
WinterCorp has architected
many of the largest databases
in production today.
At WinterCorp, Winter guides
clients through database platform
selection, benchmarking,
design, and engineering management.
He also directs the
TopTen research program, the
only validated survey of the
world’s largest databases.
Winter is an international
expert in his field with over 25
years of experience. He holds a
Bachelor of Science degree in
engineering from the University
of Michigan and serves on
the faculty of TDWI (The Data
Warehousing Institute).
Measures of the business effectiveness would
relate to the business value delivered, and this can
be quantified. In the example I provided earlier,
where call center agents at a financial services organization
present real-time offers to customers on the
phone, the enterprise can track
offer acceptance and revenue
generation. In other words, you
can measure the business effectiveness
by measuring the business
process that’s enabled by
the BI capability.
24x7: How would you summarize
the business value
of an effective BI system
RW: Business goals range
from very concrete, measurable
things like increasing revenue
or customer satisfaction to
enhancing the quality of medical
care. In general, BI is about
making more accurate, timely,
and effective business decisions
to achieve these goals.
In a vibrant BI program, the
people running the business
learn through contact with the
data and also through examples
of what the data warehouse can
do for them. As they learn, they
are constantly thinking up new
ideas to take advantage of their
BI capabilities.
The most successful BI programs
enable companies to
lead their industries with products
and services and ways of
doing business that are more
effective than their competition,
because they’re able to make
better decisions. That, I believe,
is the ultimate goal of business
intelligence. ◆
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 39

p o i n t o f v i e w
Visibility for all
Rich Ghiossi discusses how HP is changing
the business intelligence landscape
R
Rich Ghiossi has had countless opportunities over
the past 25 years to meet face-to-face with enterprise
CIOs and learn firsthand about their business intelligence
(BI) challenges. So when HP’s Enterprise
Storage & Servers (ESS) marketing organization
went in search of an expert to help craft a cohesive
and compelling enterprise BI message—one that
would span multiple product, solution, and services
areas—Ghiossi was an obvious choice. In the following
interview, he provides his unique perspective
on key BI trends and discusses HP’s presence
in the fast-growing BI marketplace.
24x7: You’ve been in the BI industry
for a long time. How has it changed in
recent years
Rich Ghiossi: When I was selling business intelligence
solutions 10 years ago, BI was certainly on
the radar of many CIOs. But it was typically not
a top priority; often they had more pressing challenges
to deal with, such as the deployment of CRM
and ERP systems.
By contrast, virtually all CIOs now see BI as
the first or second priority for their companies.
BI has moved from being “tactically strategic” in
isolated areas of the corporation to being fundamentally
strategic to the corporation as a whole.
It is now seen as a real asset—one that should be
available not only to power users and analysts,
but to every employee with operational responsibilities.
As a result of this trend, we now see BI
transitioning from standalone systems to systems
that will be integrated into virtually every application
over time.
24x7: What other trends are you seeing
RG: Enterprises are recognizing the value of their
critical information. When an organization can get
the right information to the right individuals in
time to make key operational differences, it can
have a substantial impact on the business. These
benefits show up in terms of both efficiency and
creativity. Having an effective BI system enables
the enterprise to meet customer needs that they
may not have had visibility into before, leading
to the development of new products and
services.
There is another trend toward understanding the
value of real-time or right-time information: getting
the information to people when and where they
need it. In some cases that might be in seconds, in
other cases in minutes—but it’s the concept that
I can’t wait a day to get the information. Coupled
with that, it needs to be the right information,
and not just part of it. Decision-makers need a
complete view, and this will become increasingly
evident as more and more employees start using BI
in their everyday jobs.
40 | 2 4 x 7

“BI has moved from being ‘tactically strategic’
in isolated areas of the corporation to being
fundamentally strategic to the corporation
as a whole. It is now seen as a real asset—
one that should be available not only to
power users and analysts, but to every
employee with operational responsibilities.”
24x7: How is HP responding to these
BI trends
RG: HP has a compelling story in the BI space, across
all its different enterprise technologies: ProLiant,
Integrity, StorageWorks, software—and, of course,
the HP Integrity NonStop server family. In addition,
the company has deep domain expertise and an
unrivaled partner infrastructure, ensuring that BI
solutions are fully integrated and completely responsive
to individual customer requirements. The bottom
line: HP builds truly superior BI solutions that
offer power and flexibility for enterprise customers.
HP has a vast partner network. This translates
into value for enterprise customers because it provides
extensive choices in data integration, delivery,
and analysis tools for their BI implementation.
Informatica, Business Objects, Cognos, SAS, and
Hyperion are just a few of the leading BI tool vendors
that contribute to HP’s partner advantage.
But HP partner value goes well beyond choice in
tools. Today’s BI environments have become very
complex. Customers love to hear that someone else
has already built and tested these systems, knows
how to size and tune them, and can provide expert
guidance on which configuration will be most
effective in their particular environment. HP and
its partners deliver solutions in a unique way that
lowers risk, speeds implementation, and creates
systems that are simpler to maintain.
24x7: What level of BI expertise does
HP offer
RG: In addition to the value that HP partners
deliver, there is a broad base of expertise inside HP
that can be extremely valuable as customers start to
deploy BI solutions.
Some of the most difficult challenges go well
beyond the hardware and software components.
How do you architect these systems How do you
make sure that they will meet customer needs, in
terms of number of users and different user types
How do you get the information into the systems
in a timely fashion, and how do you get the right
information from the right sources in the right form
How do you ensure that the data is cleansed and
positioned so it’s most useful to business users All
of these capabilities exist within HP, as well as in
external organizations that HP can leverage.
Additionally, HP has generated some valuable
intellectual property related to methodology for
designing, architecting, and building business intelligence
systems. This methodology has been revised
and updated over the years; hundreds of BI implementations
have used it successfully to deploy data
warehouse environments. It is available to customers
through an engagement with HP Services.
One important and highly visible area in which
HP is leveraging its BI expertise is through the
massive internal data consolidation project that is
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 41

currently in progress. This program demonstrates
HP’s understanding of how to deploy very large BI
data warehouse environments with best-of-breed
technologies and tools. This knowledge is being
transformed into best practices, which will reduce
risk and help customers implement their BI solutions
even faster and more efficiently.
Other assets that HP brings to bear in the BI
space include competency centers with deep
domain knowledge in deploying data warehousing
environments. These centers offer the opportunity
to conduct testing, tune systems, and generate best
practices. It’s also worth noting that HP is the outsourced
manager for very large data warehouse
implementations at both Procter & Gamble and
General Motors.
24x7: You’ve mentioned the extensive
expertise of HP and its partners. What
else does HP offer
RG: HP has a full portfolio of servers, storage, and
software to provide dependable and powerful BI
implementations across the line. These offerings
range from very small environments, such as marts
“Having an effective BI system
enables the enterprise to meet
customer needs that they may
not have had visibility into before,
leading to the development of
new products and services.”
or micromarts, up to very large EDW [enterprise
data warehouse] environments. One trend in the
EDW arena today is to put all critical information in
one place. This approach can be very costly, and a
single vendor currently dominates the high end of
the market.
No one has really challenged the high-end
market space until recently, with some of the
new entrants in the data warehouse appliance
market. Appliances provide a level of simplicity,
scalability, and price/performance that the leading
high-end vendor has not been able to offer;
however, they fall short in terms of robustness.
What’s exciting about one of the innovations
coming out of HP—the HP Neoview data warehousing
platform for business intelligence—is the
ability to bridge that gap. This new BI offering
combines the power and enterprise platform
capability of the market leader with the simplicity
and price/performance of data warehouse appliances.
I believe it will completely change the
landscape of business intelligence.
24x7: What kinds of customers need
BI solutions
RG: The basic answer to that question is: Everybody.
There’s virtually no industry today that is not
embracing BI at some level. Industries like retail,
telecommunications, and finance are probably
more on the cutting edge, partly because they have
so many customers. But every enterprise, regardless
of industry sector, can gain huge competitive
advantage by taking advantage of immediate, consistent,
enterprise-wide access to consolidated and
up-to-date information.
Another way to answer that question is that historically,
everybody was using business intelligence
in certain areas of their environment. Now we’re
42 | 2 4 x 7

“If I were a CIO, I would want a clear strategy for
delivering critical business and analytic information to
everyone in my enterprise who needed it—keeping in
mind that their expectation would be to get information
as they do with Google, in seconds.”
starting to see a much broader use of BI throughout
the organization. It’s not just the finance department
using BI for analysis; it’s the supply chain, the
development group—it’s all these different areas
within the company that require the right information
at the right time in order to be successful.
Today, enterprises are keeping and analyzing
massive amounts of detailed transactional data. A
large communications provider, for example, may
insert more than 23 billion call detail records into
its data warehouse each quarter. Financial institutions
must keep billions of transactions that affect
their risk positions or relate to a growing body of
legislative requirements, including Sarbanes-Oxley
and Basel II.
Healthcare institutions must comply with stringent
HIPAA requirements. Retailers need to store
and analyze billions of detailed point-of-sale
transactions to determine buying trends, properly
restock stores, and optimize discounting and clearance
actions. Regardless of industry sector, building
a single version of the truth for the enterprise is
essential for enabling the smartest and most profitable
business decisions. HP is responding with a
comprehensive portfolio of BI solutions for targeted
vertical industries.
24x7: In your opinion, what is the main
thing enterprise customers need to know
about BI
RG: As I look into my crystal ball about where
businesses are going, competition is only going to
increase. Costs are only going to need to be driven
down. Data is going to continue to explode. User
expectations are only going to grow.
If I were a CIO, I would want a clear strategy
for delivering critical business and analytic information
to everyone in my enterprise who needed
it—keeping in mind that their expectation would
be to get information as they do with Google, in
seconds. The information in most corporations is
doubling every year; this will put a tremendous
demand on BI systems, as these systems grow over
the next three to five years. The value of a strong
partner like HP in the crucial area of business intelligence
cannot be overstated. ◆
RICH GHIOSSI is eminently
qualified to drive business
intelligence messaging for
HP’s ESS division. With more
than 25 years of high-tech and marketing experience, he
has deep roots in the BI industry. Most recently, Ghiossi
was vice president of Marketing at HyperRoll, a leading
provider of software that delivers improvements
in BI application performance. Prior to that, he held VP
of Marketing and chief marketing officer positions at
several BI-related companies in the Silicon Valley. Earlier
in his career, Ghiossi held various positions at Tandem
and Compaq, including three years as vice president of
Decision Support Solutions.
f a l l 2 0 0 6 | 43

customer success
First come, first server
Bank-Verlag leads the way in deployment of next-generation system
Wolfgang Breidbach was right.
Looking ahead to the implementation
of the new HP Integrity
NonStop platform in Bank-Verlag’s
IT shop, he stated: “According to
current projections, the Itanium
processor–based NonStop system
will be three times faster than what
we have today.” And that’s just what
happened. The Integrity NonStop
servers are now up and running,
and they are delivering three to four
times the performance of the systems
they replaced—with excellent
total cost of ownership (TCO), as
verified by regular external production
benchmarking. For Breidbach,
who manages system services at
Bank-Verlag, success is sweet.
Founded in 1961 as a publishing
house, Bank-Verlag now provides a
complete technical infrastructure for
Germany’s private banks, including
all products and solutions required
for smooth, cost-effective banking
operations. The company also offers
a continuously available online and
backup data center, as well as a full
range of IT services such as hosting,
outsourcing, and application service
provision for the finance sector. Since
1988, Bank-Verlag has relied on HP
NonStop system technology to handle
a wide variety of its most demanding
processing tasks. The company’s
excellence in mission-critical execution
has twice been recognized
through the Availability Award program
of ITUG, the independent
NonStop system user group.
A thing of beauty
With transaction rates on a steep
upward trajectory, Bank-Verlag recognized
the need to evolve its existing
system. The timing couldn’t have
been better: HP was on the verge
of introducing its next-generation
Integrity NonStop platform, built
on the entirely new NonStop
Advanced Architecture and the
industry-standard Intel ® Itanium ® 2
processor. And a comprehensive
Early Adopter Program (EAP) offered
select customers the opportunity
to gain critical firsthand experience
with the new server.
Bank-Verlag’s IT professionals
jumped at the chance. They eagerly
awaited the delivery of their EAP
server; but when it arrived, they
discovered that the server appeared
to have been severely damaged
in transport. Undaunted, the staff
uncrated the machine, cabled it
up, powered it on—and true to its
name, the Integrity NonStop server
came to life as if nothing had happened.
“One physical disk and one
44 | 2 4 x 7

“The NonStop system fundamentals—in
particular, the continuous availability of the
platform—are of critical importance to the
continuing success of Bank-Verlag.”
Wolfgang Breidbach, manager of system services, Bank-Verlag
ServerNet connection were damaged,
but no defects affected any
user,” said Breidbach. “The system
proved to be truly fault tolerant.”
Following a successful test period,
Bank-Verlag decided to migrate
its entire NonStop system environment
to the new platform, becoming
the first customer worldwide
to put the Integrity NonStop server
into production.
As migrations go, this one was
a thing of beauty. The first phase
involved the development and
backup production systems. Plans
and checklists were made, customers
were informed, and the estimated
migration time was carefully
calculated. Officially, migration of
the backup production system was
projected to take 24 hours, starting
on a Saturday night; unofficially,
Breidbach’s goal was to be home
for breakfast on Sunday morning.
He made it home in plenty of time,
and the second phase of the migration
(QA and primary production
systems) was completed a few
weeks later.
So far, the Integrity NonStop system
has exceeded Bank-Verlag’s
expectations. “With its exceptional
price/performance, this platform
makes it possible for us to
deploy new services much more
quickly and cost-effectively,” said
Breidbach. “In addition, we are considering
whether applications that
currently reside on other systems
might run more cost-effectively on
the Integrity NonStop platform.”
Calculated TCO on Bank-Verlag’s
Integrity NonStop system for the
first three years shows a modest
cost reduction with three to four
times more system power, providing
sufficient capacity for powerhungry
J2EE applications.
Proof point
Bank-Verlag’s transaction-intensive
Eurocheque card authorization
center is the kind of application
that demands the continuous availability
and powerful performance
of the Integrity NonStop server.
Eurocheque card transactions at
ATMs and POS terminals worldwide
are authorized by Bank-Verlag
itself or routed to the specific bank’s
authorization system; if the latter is
unavailable, Bank-Verlag performs
a stand-in authorization in order
to ensure a successful transaction.
The Bank-Verlag authorization system—implemented
on two Integrity
NonStop servers using an in-house
developed active-active configuration—processes
more than 2 million
transactions per day at peak load,
and up to 400 million transactions
per year. Poseidon OLTP software
from Atos Worldline supports the
authorization center.
Examples of other applications
are the CardCash service for POS
terminals, central account register,
highest-security PIN-letter production,
and electronic banking.
These applications are distributed
across Bank-Verlag’s NonStop and
Integrity NonStop servers. (A new,
consolidated e-banking application
is slated for deployment on
the Integrity NonStop platform
in the future.) The applications
are implemented with a primary
and a backup system, using HP
NonStop Remote Database Facility
(NonStop RDF) to support business
continuity.
According to Breidbach, Bank-
Verlag decided to implement the
new HP Integrity NonStop server
for several reasons, including excellent
TCO and a high confidence
level in the platform. The implementation
went smoothly, with
excellent support from HP, and the
few technical details that demanded
attention were resolved quickly and
efficiently.
“As expected, we are seeing dramatically
increased performance
from the Integrity NonStop server,
and it clearly offers the capacity to
host new services that we develop
for our customers,” he concluded.
“The NonStop system fundamentals—in
particular, the continuous
availability of the platform—are of
critical importance to the continuing
success of Bank-Verlag. And the
speed is fantastic!” ◆
FOR BANK-VERLAG,
INTEGRITY NONSTOP
SYSTEMS:
Deliver three to four times
the performance of the
systems they replaced—
with excellent TCO
Provide true fault tolerance
and continuous availability
Make it possible to deploy
new services much more
quickly and cost-effectively
Allow its authorization
system to process more than
2 million transactions per day
at peak load
F a l l 2 0 0 6 | 45

customer success
Success Strategy Title and Speed
KDDI takes Japan’s mobile messaging market by storm
As the world marches inexorably
toward the ubiquitous network
society, with Japan in the vanguard,
Tokyo-based KDDI Corporation has
taken a leading position. KDDI provides
a comprehensive suite of services;
and the company is intensely
focused on driving the convergence
of fixed and mobile networks to
enable “whenever, wherever, whoever,
whatever” communications. A
key component in KDDI’s strategy—
particularly in the fast-growing “au”
mobile messaging segment of its
business—is the continuously available
HP Integrity NonStop server.
If the aim is to serve the everyday
communications challenges
and needs of Japanese society, “au”
service is a clear winner. The solution
lets individuals make voice
calls, send pictures and video clips,
“The Integrity NonStop server effectively
addresses our three primary business
challenges: cost, reliability, and speed of
development.”
Teruaki Homma, head of Messaging System Development, KDDI
download music, find their precise
location on the globe, and
communicate via real-time e-mail
messages. Not surprisingly, KDDI
leads the industry in Japan in terms
of subscriber growth for mobile
services.
A powerful system of more than
1,500 processors at KDDI was
recently expanded to include the
new HP Integrity NonStop server,
based on the industry-standard
Intel ® Itanium ® 2 processor. The
system keeps this dynamic application
running around the clock, with
lightning-fast response at competitive
price levels.
MEASURABLE VALUE,
CLEAR BENEFITS
The decision to introduce the
Integrity NonStop server into
his company’s high-profile “au”
46 | 2 4 x 7

environment was a relatively
straightforward one for Teruaki
Homma, head of Messaging
System Development for KDDI’s
FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence)
Platform Development Department.
“The Integrity NonStop server effectively
addresses our three primary
business challenges: cost, reliability,
and speed of development,” he
explained. “In terms of cost, the
greatly improved price/performance
of the new platform reduces total
cost of ownership significantly. The
reliability of the system is exceptional,
with the new Triple Modular
Redundancy configuration. And we
were able to put the system into
production with very few changes
to the application; in fact, 80 percent
of the code ran on the new server
with no modification. That really
surprised me.”
Needless to say, Homma and
his team took great pains to ensure
a successful implementation. For
five months prior to the launch
date, engineers from HP and KDDI
stressed the mail application running
on an early adopter system
in HP’s Advanced Technology
Center. This cooperative effort was
indicative of the strategic partnership
that exists between the two
companies—a partnership that will
continue to pay dividends as KDDI
seeks to optimize the performance
of its Integrity NonStop servers. “We
need to cope with Japan’s explosion
in mobile phone usage, and
we need a partner that can match
our speed of development,” said
Homma. “HP was the choice for us.”
In addition to stellar price/performance
(it delivers approximately
twice the performance at half the
cost of earlier generations of the
NonStop platform), the Integrity
NonStop server brings many significant
benefits to KDDI’s mobile environment.
One obvious advantage is
“We were able to put the system into
production with very few changes to the
application; in fact, 80 percent of the code
ran on the new server with no modification.”
Teruaki Homma, head of Messaging System Development, KDDI
the smaller footprint of the system.
“From the environmental point of
view, the ability to save space and
reduce electronic power consumption
is very important for us,” said
Homma. “By providing so much
more processing power per cabinet,
the Integrity NonStop server helps
us maximize the use of our available
space.” Standard 42U racks in
the new platform are also seen as a
welcome change.
The Integrity NonStop system
provides other benefits as well.
Continuous availability is an obvious
one, because Japanese subscribers
require no service downtime
and no latency in message delivery.
Linear scalability is also crucial: As
KDDI’s subscriber base grows, the
Integrity NonStop system can grow
right along with it. Having the operating
system and database as part
of the same package—right out of
the box—makes it much easier to
tune the powerful NonStop SQL
database.
TEMPO FOR SUCCESS
For Homma, however, the real
value of the Integrity NonStop
server is the speedy, reliable, 24x7
response that it provides for “au”
customers. “In order to grow our
subscriber base, we need to deliver
optimal service in the most efficient
and cost-effective way,” he
said. “The excellent total cost of
ownership of the Integrity NonStop
server, coupled with HP’s commitment
to help us maximize the performance
of the system, makes this
platform ideal for the mail application.
We are confident that this
powerful new platform will deliver
measurable value for KDDI.”
KDDI is always pushing the
frontier of technology in its drive
toward truly ubiquitous communications.
“We constantly seek
innovative ways to deliver new
and enhanced services to our customers,”
concluded Homma. “HP
moves at the same tempo. KDDI
has adopted ‘strategy and speed’
as the keywords for our business
operations, and we are pleased to
have a strategic partner that moves
as fast as we do.” ◆
FOR KDDI, Integrity
NONSTOP SYSTEMS:
Deliver twice the performance
at half the cost of the previous
generation of NonStop systems
Provide reliable, 24x7 response
through Triple Modular Redundancy
Support innovative new services
Can scale right along with subscriber
base
F a l l 2 0 0 6 | 47

customer success
Twice as much
for the same price
Rabobank set to improve availability and reduce costs
with HP Integrity NonStop platform
Redundancy is a matter of course
for business-critical IT systems today,
but the same cannot yet be said about
triple redundancy. Technological
progress has allowed a drop in the
price of systems used to prevent
downtime. For organizations with
migration plans, this presents an
excellent opportunity for a considerable
increase in system availability
at a lower cost. Rabobank Nederland
is one of the first to seize this opportunity.
Using Intel ® Itanium ® 2 processors
in the new HP Integrity NonStop
server platform, Rabobank will be
the first financial institution in the
Netherlands with a theoretical system
availability of 99.99999 percent.
In other words, the hardware itself,
leaving the rest of the infrastructure
aside, has an average downtime of
no more than 3 seconds per year.
Having been a satisfied user of
the HP NonStop platform for many
years, Rabobank was looking for
a new system in order to cope
with expected growth, mainly for
Internet banking and money transfers.
Diederick de Buck, system
architect for Rabobank Nederland,
elaborated: “Online banking grew
by 30 percent in 2005. The number
of withdrawals from cash dispensers
and PIN payments also increased
considerably, by 8 percent in 2005.
These developments in recent years
have led to spectacular growth in
the number of transactions that our
systems have to process.”
End of a life cycle
“As our existing platform was nearing
the end of its life cycle, we
started to look for a new solution,”
de Buck said. “The present hardware
can still be purchased until
the end of 2008, but development
stopped in 2005. This means that
we can cover the annual increase
in required capacity only by adding
machines—resulting in greater
complexity, more components, and
higher costs. If we restrict ourselves
to adding the ‘old’ MIPS-based
NonStop S-series systems, we will
reach the physical limits of telebanking
within the year. Availability
of components will also decrease,
because new technology will slowly
but surely replace existing systems.
If we choose a more powerful
platform now, we will be ahead of
these developments.”
Rabobank wanted a new architecture
that would exceed the availability,
scalability, and reliability
48 | 2 4 x 7

of the existing system, at a lower
cost. “So we welcomed the fact that
HP introduced the Integrity NonStop
server platform as a successor to the
familiar NonStop platform. Systems
that achieve twice as much for the
same price are obviously something
that appeals to us,” said de Buck.
A clear and tested
migration path
According to de Buck, HP successfully
meets the needs of the market.
“We participated actively in IMAG,
the Itanium Migration Advisory
Group. IMAG acted as HP’s sounding
board for the Intel Itanium processor
and included the major clients
that planned to migrate to the new
platform. This is why we knew right
from the start—and firsthand—that
the new architecture would suit our
needs. Thanks to the use of industrystandard
components, such as the
Intel Itanium 2 processor, the price/
performance ratio of the Integrity
NonStop platform has improved
dramatically. In view of our strong
growth in telebanking, we immediately
recognized the advantages of
migration.
“With a select group of clients
from a variety of sectors,” added de
Buck, “we attended two meetings
a year in the space of a few years’
time. These meetings showed how
versatile the new platform is. It
is equally suited for organizations
with extreme availability requirements
and for companies with a
wide range of applications developed
in-house.”
In a test environment, Rabobank
has already found that triple redundancy
guarantees a very high level
of hardware reliability. “Reliability
is based on experiences in the
aviation industry,” de Buck stated.
“In the rare case of a hardware failure,
the software does not crash,
because it automatically switches
to the other hardware present,
and we are notified that hardware
needs to be replaced.”
As an early adopter, Rabobank is
engaged with many software suppliers
that are already prepared for
the changeover. Research by HP
has shown there are 4,000 applications
worldwide that are suitable
for the Intel Itanium 2 processor–
based Integrity NonStop platform.
“As trendsetters, we know that we
must wait for adaptations of applications
by partners who have a
different ambition level than we do,”
said de Buck. “Some make their
software available for the Itanium
platform quickly, while others take
a little longer.”
A financial institution such as
Rabobank, with a broad portfolio of
in-house developed software, makes
a thorough inventory of any complications
that may be expected before
it decides to migrate. In so doing,
de Buck concluded that the risks
are minimal: “Obviously we have
carried out extensive tests to see
whether our current NonStop system
environment will run on the Itanium
processors without any problems,
and whether the new platform will
communicate smoothly with our
existing IT infrastructure. We have
found this to be the case, so our production
environment will be transferred
during the course of 2006.
“Because we will first migrate
our data to an HP StorageWorks XP
array—which cooperates seamlessly
with the new Integrity NonStop
“The choice was actually simple for us:
HP is the first and currently the only
supplier that can offer such performance,
scalability, and availability.”
Diederick de Buck, system architect, Rabobank
F a l l 2 0 0 6 | 49

“The performance of this solution will be
twice as high, at the same time allowing
us to reduce the total cost of ownership of
our IT infrastructure.”
Diederick de Buck, system architect, Rabobank
Triple the Solution
The risk of an IT infrastructure
failing is currently determined
mainly by software and human
errors. Hardware failure can be
countered by having all components
duplicated. By making software
redundant as well, and reducing the
chances of hardware failure, the
risk of human failure also decreases
and fewer corrections are necessary.
Sophisticated software is able
to detect hardware failures—and
automatically switches to the other
available hardware.
The next step is triple redundancy.
With its Integrity NonStop servers
based on Intel Itanium 2 processors,
HP has introduced a standard solution
for achieving triple redundancy.
It provides a theoretical availability
of 99.99999 percent, or a mere
3 seconds of downtime per year.
With the new NonStop Advanced
Architecture, HP is the first supplier
to introduce a system to the market
that offers triple redundancy using
standard components.
system environment—the migration
process is simply a matter of
disconnecting the cables from the
old systems and plugging them into
the new ones,” explained de Buck.
“Our code runs almost without any
adaptations on both the old and the
new platform.”
performance, scalability,
availability
Rabobank expects many advantages
from the migration. “The performance
of this solution will be twice
as high, at the same time allowing us
to reduce the total cost of ownership
of our IT infrastructure,” de Buck
stated with satisfaction. “During our
tests, we were pleasantly surprised,
because the system performed
even better than expected with
processor-intensive tasks. Java
applications performed 3 times better
than before, while encrypted
data and complex queries were
processed 4 to 10 times faster. In
addition, the administrators of our
business applications no longer
need to carry out manual rebalancing.
The triple redundancy in the
Integrity NonStop server prevents
a CPU failure from being visible to
the application, so rebalancing is
unnecessary. This saves a great deal
of time.”
Rabobank believes that the use
of standard hardware is very important,
because it allows the bank to
reduce the infrastructure’s TCO. As
de Buck explained, “The Integrity
NonStop platform can be used for
the majority of our main applications.
The favorable price levels,
comparable to a high-end UNIX ®
system environment, enable us to
run a twin system at our location
in Best, as well as a separate test
environment. The systems in Best
can be deployed immediately if the
other computer center in Zeist fails.
A total of six client systems will run
on the platform. The choice was
actually simple for us: HP is the first
and currently the only supplier that
can offer such performance, scalability,
and availability.” ◆
FOR RABOBANK,
Integrity NONSTOP
SYSTEMS:
Provide flawless processing of
large numbers of transactions
per second
Deliver high application availability
Simplify integration and management,
with lower TCO because of
reduced complexity
Offer a future-proof infrastructure
because of scalability,
upgradability, and the promise of
performance improvements
50 | 2 4 x 7

customer success
Service with a Sonrisa
EVERTEC enables single customer view for Banco Popular de Puerto Rico
Customer statement: We achieve satisfaction for our customers and
earn their loyalty by adding value to each interaction. Our relationship with
the customer takes precedence over any particular transaction.
Innovation statement: We encourage the constant search for new
solutions as a strategy to enhance our competitive advantage.
Institutional value statements always
sound impressive, but translating
them into action—and linking
them directly and visibly to positive
results—can prove challenging.
This is not the case, however,
with Popular, Inc., and subsidiary
EVERTEC. The company’s groundbreaking
Technology Infrastructure
Project (TIP), three years in the
making and in the middle of production
rollout on the HP NonStop
server, puts a clear and credible
face on the underlying corporate
philosophy.
Miguel Mercado is in charge
of making the project a success.
“Our job in the Enterprise Systems
Architecture division is to design
systems that enable our customers
to transform strategic goals
into operational realities,” he said.
Mercado is senior vice president of
EVERTEC, Popular, Inc.’s transaction
processing and IT outsourcing
subsidiary.
A PRECIOUS VAULT
TIP started as a senior management
review of performance issues
with the Internet channel of Banco
Popular de Puerto Rico (BPPR)—
Popular’s banking subsidiary and
EVERTEC’s largest client. The investigation
led to a stunning revelation:
The problem lay not in the application
itself, but in the underlying
infrastructure that provided services
to the Internet channel application.
“Every time a bank customer signed
on to the Internet channel, related
information had to be retrieved
from multiple back-office applications,”
recalled Mercado. “Obtaining
that information involved a very
complicated messaging architecture.
In addition, any problem with
the mainframe that hosted those
52 | 2 4 x 7

applications meant that the Internet
channel was not available to the
customer.”
The team decided to create
a data model with all customer
information, centralize it on an HP
NonStop server, and connect all
channels of the bank to that system.
The ultimate goal was to create
a single and consistent view
of the customer across all channels,
providing superior service as
well as expanding opportunities for
up- and cross-selling by service representatives.
The team also created
a customer-centric data model in
the NonStop system environment.
Every day, information from the
batch applications on the mainframe—and
some online, real-time
applications—are fed into this data
model. Information is updated in
an operational data store (ODS)
known as the “Transaction Vault.”
First into production was the
voice recognition unit (VRU) channel,
followed by online banking.
The plan is to integrate all channels
into the Transaction Vault, including
the branch offices, agent-assisted
call centers, commercial lending
units, ATMs, and POS terminals.
“Once TIP has been fully implemented,
all these requests will be
serviced locally by the Transaction
Vault,” said Mercado. “We won’t
have to go to the mainframe to get
the information. And if the mainframe
decides not to be available,
the customer will not see any interruption
in service.”
ADVANTAGES In PLace
of ISSUES
TIP is built on the Open System
Services (OSS) version of the
NonStop platform. “A lot of people
didn’t believe the NonStop system
was open enough to create the new
infrastructure, but we have proven
them wrong,” stated Mercado.
“We’re using CORBA as the transport
for XML messages between
the channels and the Transaction
Vault; C++ is used for the business
logic modules; and WebSphere
MQ provides the communications
between the Transaction Vault and
the mainframe. The ability to use
open standards was important to
us, in terms of both resource availability
and ease of development.”
Also important were the mixedworkload
capabilities of the platform—even
loading millions of
records a day does not degrade the
response time to online queries—in
addition to its hallmark availability
and scalability features. TIP runs
on a six-processor NonStop S88000
server with NonStop SQL, fully replicated
to an identical server using
GoldenGate software.
Previously, the Internet channel
could retrieve the account balance
from ACI BASE24, but it was getting
yesterday’s transactions from
the mainframe. In order to balance
the online statement for customers,
the channel application had to
perform specific arithmetic functions.
“With TIP, we can now present
the detail of all transactions in
near real time,” said Mercado. “If
customers perform a transaction at
an ATM or POS terminal and then
“We definitely see the NonStop systems as
strategic for us. We feel that what we have
created—the single customer view—will give
the bank a significant competitive advantage
over its competitors.”
Miguel Mercado, senior VP, EVERTEC
F a l l 2 0 0 6 | 53

Support from the top
Popular, Inc.’s Technology Infrastructure
Project (TIP) is the realization of a
dream for visionary CEO Richard Carrión,
whose late-’70s PhD thesis at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
was titled “A Decision Framework for
Consumer-Oriented Electronic Funds
Transfer Systems.” Under Carrión’s leadership,
Banco Popular de Puerto Rico
was one of the earliest users of ACI
BASE24 software; the bank has run
its mission-critical EFT applications on
the HP NonStop platform for nearly a
quarter-century.
TIP is built on the HP NonStop server–
based Real Time Financial Services
(RTFS) framework. Through the use of
HP’s Real Time Enterprise architecture—
which underpins the RTFS solution—the
company will focus on enabling its critical
design objectives:
■ Real-time transaction processing,
with 24x7 availability of customer
information
■ Consolidation and organization of
customer data by customer (not
by application) to enable a single
customer view
bring up their Internet account
immediately afterwards, they will
see the details of the transaction
that was just completed.”
POWERFUL SYNERGY
Key partnerships helped ensure the
successful creation and deployment
of TIP. HP played an integral role—
first with comprehensive exploration
services to identify business
objectives and understand how HP
technology could meet them, and
then in designing the system itself.
The design was then handed off to
Opsol Integrators for development.
Because Mercado planned to
utilize the full scope of HP’s Real
Time Enterprise (RTE) architecture
as the basis of the solution and
because Opsol Integrators has been
actively engaged in such implementations
since 2001, there was
a natural synergy between the two
companies. “We do the custom
programming to connect all these
systems,” explained Opsol CEO
Yash Kapadia. “All the server-side
programming on the NonStop system
to build the ODS, create the
data model, feed data into the data
model, handle incoming requests
from the channels, pass them to the
single customer view, come back
with the rules, pass it to the mainframe—we
do the programming for
all of these aspects.” Having much
of the infrastructure in place via the
Opsol RTFS Hub made it possible
to accelerate the project schedule
while still containing costs.
Informatica PowerExchange and
PowerCenter form the data integration
backbone of the TIP system.
This leading extract, transform, and
load (ETL) technology proved to
be the right choice for contending
with the complicated data structures,
according to Mercado. In fact,
he estimates that the Informatica
platform helped reduce the time
required to custom-code integration
between the mainframe-based legacy
applications and the Transaction
Vault by six to nine months.
ADAPTIVE ENTERPRISE
With the implementation of TIP,
EVERTEC has become even more
adaptive in responding to BPPR’s
needs. One example is the Vault
Access Channel (VAC) project,
which enables branch-based customer
service representatives to display
check images in response to a
customer request. In the past, the
agent had to type the request into
a mainframe system. The request
went to somebody in the back
office, who made a photocopy of
the check and sent it to the customer.
It took days for the customer
to get the requested copy.
The bank wanted the ability
to provide a copy immediately to
the customer at the branch, but
With TIP, Carrión fully expects to change
the landscape of how financial services
business is done. “The idea is to migrate
the operations little by little to this new
environment,” he explains in an article
in the business magazine Negocios.
Progress is steady, with full channel
integration slated for 2009.
“We wanted to separate what we call
the relationship bank from the transaction
bank. This will allow us to adapt to changes
in the market and be more competitive.”
Miguel Mercado, senior VP, EVERTEC
54 | 2 4 x 7

“Because it’s a Webbased
application, we
The TIP team (from left): Luis Muñoz, Heriberto Matos, Herminio
De Jesús, Patricia Crumley, Juan Pruna, Aurea Sánchez, Lorraine
Reyes, Glorimar Ripoll, Miguel Mercado.
implementing the application in the
mainframe environment was problematic.
For one thing, the personal
computers used at the branches were
not powerful enough to handle the
resource demands imposed by the
mainframe-based application.
EVERTEC was able to leverage
TIP to provide an effective solution.
“We took the service created
to present images in the Internet
channel and simply replicated it for
the VAC,” said Mercado. “Because
it’s a Web-based application, we
did not have to install anything
new at the branches; the existing
PCs can be used to access the
Internet. We gave the bank the
capability of looking at the images
with the new application in just
two hours. This was something
powerful that we were able to do
very fast for the bank.”
In general, locating the
Transaction Vault between the
channel applications and the core
back-office applications enables the
bank to add a new channel—or a
new back-office application—with
a single connection. “We wanted
to separate what we call the relationship
bank from the transaction
bank,” said Mercado. “This will
allow us to adapt to changes in the
market and be more competitive.”
MARKET LEADER
TIP is a multiyear, multimilliondollar
project with strong management
commitment (see “Support
from the Top”). “We definitely see
the NonStop systems as strategic
for us,” said Mercado. “We feel that
what we have created—the single
customer view—will give the bank
a significant competitive advantage
over its competitors.” In the future,
TIP will allow the bank to identify
and address service and sales
opportunities (for example, credit
card promotions) at the point of
contact with the customer.
“BPPR is the largest bank in
Puerto Rico, so it has to be the
leader,” concluded Mercado. “The
bank invests a lot in innovation,
because it has to be the first to
bring new services to the market.
BPPR strongly believes that TIP
will provide many advantages over
institutions that lack a single, consistent
view of the customer. It will
bring to reality one of the core values
of the bank: that the customer
is treated as a relationship, not as a
transaction.” ◆
did not have to install
anything new at the
branches; the existing
PCs can be used to
access the Internet.”
Miguel Mercado, senior VP, EVERTEC
FOR EVERTEC AND BPPR,
NONSTOP SYSTEMS:
Centralize customer data and
bank channels for a single customer
view
Deliver real-time, 24x7 availability
of critical information
Offer scalability to accommodate
growth
Support an adaptive infrastructure,
so new services can be
brought to market quickly
F a l l 2 0 0 6 | 55

more information
To find out more about HP Integrity NonStop servers, call 1 (800) 282 6672,
or visit our website at hp.com/go/nonstop for details on the servers, software,
education, support, partners, and lots more.
FROM ITUG:
How to increase your ROI by joining the
global HP user community
In today’s business environment, return on investment (ROI) is a top
priority. ITUG members can achieve ROI not only through the enhancement
of NonStop system skills, but also via a network of 1,500 members
including HP experts, alliance partners, and developers who share the
information and answers you need to help you do your job.
ITUG, our community of users and partners, keeps you at the forefront
of what is going on with HP and its NonStop and Integrity NonStop
servers—information you can’t afford to miss in these times of change.
Our global community is active year-round through our online resources at
www.ITUG.org, special interest groups (SIGs), regional user groups (RUGs),
and face-to-face educational events. We offer members unparalleled
access to expertise and answers that your job demands from you every
day. Our user-focused technical journal, The Connection, is recognized
for its high-quality content about NonStop systems. In addition, we are
constantly working with HP to ensure our synergy in this ever-changing
business environment.
Visit www.itug.org/membership/benefits.cfm for details on membership
benefits—and learn about one of the best investments that any NonStop
system professional or installation could make.
For more information, visit our website at www.ITUG.org
or call +1 (312) 321 6851.
SUBSCRIBE TO 24x7
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version, go to www.hp24x7.com/
subscribe/subscribe-24x7.html.
Do you have ideas for stories or other
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feedback at nonstopmarketing@hp.com.
INDEX OF ADVERTISERS
Carr Scott Software Inc. .............................................25
HP NonStop Server Solutions
(DM Review Award) .......................................................... 4
HP NonStop Server Training..................................IFC
Opsol Integrators Inc. ................................................... 51
XYPRO Technology Corporation...........................IBC
If you are interested in 24x7 sponsorship,
contact barbara.erichsen@hp.com.
56 | 2 4 x 7

Twice is Nice
It’s been three years since we wrote “HP
NonStop Security, A Practical Handbook,”
which explained security mechanisms, guidelines
and Best Practices for Guardian environments.
But there was much more to address.
So we are pleased to announce a second tome,
this time focusing on OSS, TCP/IP and database
security. Several NonStop customers and Guest
Contributors, all experts in their field, generously
shared their knowledge, making this book a
truly collaborative accomplishment. The result
is another defense-in-depth reference for the
HP NonStop Server community.
XYPRO ® . We wrote the book on security. Again.
Headquarters, USA: +1 805-583-2874
Eastern North America: +1 905-332-3669
UK, Europe: +44 (0) 1384 850 133
www.xypro.com • info@xypro.com
Asia Pacific: +61 (3) 9844 5019
Korea: +82 2 6377 5171
Africa: +27 82 65 00 991
XYGATE and XYPRO are registered trademarks of XYPRO Technology Corporation. All other brand or product names, trademarks or registered trademarks are acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.

“Business intelligence can’t be an afterthought.
Companies need to think differently about the way they
approach BI in order to fully exploit the power that’s now
available to them. It needs to be a core element of the
enterprise strategy and part of everyone’s mainline job.”
Greg Battas, distinguished technologist at HP
24x7
t h e W O R L D o f I n t e g r i t y n o n s t o p c o m p u t i n g
Harding Marketing, 377 South Daniel Way, San Jose, CA 95128