TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. - When Tinker FCU here walked away from Symitar’s job-scheduling tool and went with an IBM solution instead, there were no hard feelings.
“We recognize that no single product fits every credit union’s needs,” said John San Filippo, marketing manager at Symitar. “From our vantage, it’s much more important that each credit union has the right pieces rather than our pieces. We actually help our clients to ensure that they have exactly the technology pieces they need–all working in harmony.”
“Symitar believes in what we are trying to accomplish at our institution,” added Steve Mooney, VP-information services operations at $1.6- billion Tinker FCU. “We will be doing many great things with Symitar in the future.”
This time, however, the price for the process automation solution that Symitar offers was just too dear. “I was interested in the job-scheduling solution until I got the pricing,” Mooney continued. “It’s a utility priced in the six digits. I choked.”
Mooney needed a more affordable way to automatically complete Tinker’s daily and nightly processing–a seven-hour task that five operators would manually execute day after day, at times with some errors. Tinker turned to IBM and found the Tivoli Workload Scheduler, which “works tightly with Episys,” said Mooney. When Tivoli goes live this month with the help of Doug McLaughlin and Eric Trinh, Tinker’s software development and database specialists, Tinker will be able to switch all five operators over to more important tasks, said Mooney. Tivoli will take charge of all daily and nightly processing–and complete the job in about four hours per day.
Tivoli can be extended beyond daily processing and integrated with any third-party platform to complete all sorts of repetitive tasks, including data backup, extraction, migration and snapshots, he added. Better yet, Mooney said Tinker paid $73,000 for Tivoli, about $150,000 less than what Tinker would have paid for the Symitar offering.
Though Tinker had to walk away from Symitar to save money on job-scheduling, the $1.6-billion CU found that the provider was more than happy to help cut costs on other Tinker toys.
“Symitar listens to us, and if we suggest something that makes sense, they get excited about it,” Mooney said. In this case, Tinker’s suggestion originated from the fact that credit unions traditionally run their core backups and reporting straight on the Episys core system–“and they shouldn’t,” said Mooney. The backup and reporting processes demand too much of the system’s power, power that should be devoted to transaction processing, he said.
As processing power is diluted and each backup and reporting sequence takes more and more time, many credit unions are forced to upgrade their Episys equipment, often at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, said Mooney.
Instead of upgrading, Mooney suggested that the backup and reporting jobs could be redistributed to a $25,000 blade server, instead. The concept is so good that Tinker has already budgeted the switch for this year, said Mooney.
“That’s something that could help smaller credit unions, as well,” he said. “They can redistribute instead of upgrade.” The bigger picture resulting from a collaborative approach between Tinker and Symitar is a better computing infrastructure for everyone, said Mooney. “We’re going to take Symitar down a path that’s going to make its product so much more powerful,” he said.
“With more than 500 CUs using Episys, there’s an impressive user network out there,” San Filippo said. “When a progressive credit union like Tinker tries something new, word gets out. Our clients truly help each other move forward.”
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Read more about tech relationships at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Why CU Vendors Deserve A Little Loving
CUs Discuss Mistakes-Intended Or Otherwise-Vendors Make
Credit Union Journal Tech Roundtable
For info on this story:
* www.tinkerfcu.org
* www.symitar.com
* www.ibm.com
