Cutting through the Fog of Financial Transparency
Between the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Basel II accords covering international banking regulations, the Patriot Act, and a variety of other national, regional, and local requirements, corporations face truly staggering financial reporting and compliance laws.
It is all for good reasons, of course. Many of the laws, at the basic level at least, are about ensuring transparency of financial transactions, something that corporations strive to do so that stakeholders are served honestly and effectively. Other regulations, such as the Basel II accords, are designed to avoid problems that can start in one institution and then spread quickly to others in the global financial network. A third type of legislation is designed to prevent money laundering. In all cases, such laws are here to support and protect everyone: employees, shareholders, strategic partners, and even the general public.
The problem is that modern corporations face formal reporting requirements and the evolving nature of both the laws and the businesses they are designed to regulate, and the growing complexity of keeping up with the changes. As businesses grow, so does the amount of data they must track. Additionally, companies also want to mine and manage their own data for internal uses to better understand customer needs and product effectiveness. Overall, this is a challenging and ongoing problem.
Here are a few examples of what this has meant for specific companies:
- Scottish Life, a major U.K. pension provider and part of the Royal London Group, was faced with the complex problem of upgrading its financial reporting systems several years ago which included the migration of more than 750 million lines of code.
- Austria’s fourth largest building society,Allgemeine Bausparkasse (ABV), which manages more than 600,000 contracts through a network of more than 4,000 independent consultants, needed to replace a 15-year old RISC-based system with a far more effective system.
- Kindred Healthcare, a $4 billion healthcare services company operating hospitals, long-term acute care and other services, had seen its business grow to include 138 active company codes, 58,000 Profit/Cost Centers, 51,000 employees, and a database that had grown from 200 GB to more than 2 Terabytes in less than 10 years.
To solve their compliance issues, while also providing improved efficiency of operation and increased planning insight into their company’s operations, these three companies were among many that turned to Itanium-based solutions. Why? Because the combination of the Intel Itanium processors, the unique hardware architectures that allow for straightforward scalability, fast computing speeds, high availability, and state-of-the-art industry-leading software solutions such as those provided by Oracle and SAP, provided the combination of power, flexibility, compliance tools, and business insight unmatched by other platforms currently on the market.
Here’s what happened after their systems were up and running:
- For Scottish LIfe, its Itanium-based solution sped up batch processing time by one-third, increased responsiveness to data queries throughout its user network, and lowered overall operating costs by 50 percent from the previous solution.
- For ABV, moving to an Itanium-based solution produced what turned out to be as much as an eight-fold improvement in system performance on some of the toughest data mining tasks, while at the same time reducing maintenance costs by 35 percent.
- For Kindred Healthcare, the Itanium-based solution decision improved report generation times from 2.6 X to 3.7X, and specific data queries came back as much as 8 times faster than before. It also lowered operating costs and dramatically increased system availability, which were both critical parameters for the company moving forward.
These companies weren’t alone in their choice of computing platform. More than 75percent of the world’s Global 100 Corporations, including five of the top nine financial services companies, have implemented Itanium-based solutions.
What does this mean to you? If your IT systems aren’t completely up-to-date, it is time to find a new computing solution. You toned to stay compliant with the latest financial reporting laws and provide rapid, complex, and responsive business intelligence analysis throughout your company’s networks. Plus, there is an added incentive of dramatically reducing support and maintenance costs at the same time.
And while there are other providers available, where else can you find the most powerful microprocessor solution at the core, the widest choice of operating systems, and a software solutions network of more than 12,000 applications tuned for the Intel Itanium processor?
Don’t just take my word for it. Browse the Alliance website, read the solutions articles, and contact companies for referrals and advice. You will be glad you did, as will your shareholders and customers. And yes, those government auditors in dark suits are going to be a great deal happier as well!