Most large financial institutions still rely on the mainframe for their major application processing. These installations will have at least one report management and document management solution implemented, handling outputs from most of the applications. Many companies have some applications running in an Open Systems environment, and at RSD customer sites, output from those applications may be captured and stored in the installed mainframe databases. However, the Open Systems applications may be under the control of a local Business Unit, and often the Units wish to retain full control over their output data as well. RSD have had Open Systems versions of their tools available for many years.
There are still many companies who retain their key applications on the mainframe, but if a section of the application is for a remote Business Unit, especially overseas, then a compromise may be the preferred option.
For example, a large insurance company in Australia has a division in New Zealand, and their output data for one particular mainframe application was being produced in PCL format, which was then converted into PDF format, and captured in an RSD database on a Windows Server. Customer Service representatives in New Zealand would have access to the policies from a Thin Client, allowing them to answer customer queries.
A recent project saw a number of changes being successfully implemented.
The application on the mainframe was changed so that output files were generated in PDF format, so those files were automatically sent to the Windows Server. The Server was also upgraded (to Windows Server 2012), and the RSD product version was upgraded too, with the database migrated to the new version.
A collection of Directory Watcher utilities, running as Windows Services, were also implemented by the RSD Team, which allowed the PDF files to be automatically ingested into the RSD database.
The final change is the implementation of an RSD API, which will allow the Policy files to be accessed directly from the customer’s in-house frontend, and subsequent plans are to make the Policy data available directly from the homes of the Policy holders.