Headlines:
Bisys in Talks to Sell Its Education Unit HarborOne CU Using Compellent System TeaLeaf Software Tracks Wells Portal
Bisys in Talks to Sell Its Education Unit
Bisys Group Inc., which provides mostly technological outsourcing services to financial companies, has put its education services business on the block.
The unit offers continuing education and licensing preparation courses for financial services employees; it serves about 400,000 people a year that way. It also provides software to automate licensing and registration processes for insurance and investment companies.
The New York company said Thursday that it was talking with potential buyers, and that its board had approved selling the unit. It said it expects to take a goodwill impairment charge in its fiscal third quarter, which ended Thursday, of $90 million before taxes.
Bisys did not say how much it expects from a sale. It said the third-quarter report would list the operation as discontinued and classify its net assets as "held for sale."
Last year Bisys was forced to restate its earnings dating back to 2001 because its insurance group had overestimated of sales commissions at insurers it had acquired. The company took a writedown to reflect reduced earnings and balance sheet adjustments, which topped $100 million.
HarborOne CU Using Compellent System
HarborOne Credit Union of Brockton, Mass., has switched to a storage area network from Compellent Technologies Inc. of Eden Prairie, Minn., for its increasing volume of customer data.
The vendor said last week that early last year it replaced 11 separately managed servers in three data centers for the $1 billion-asset credit union.
"HarborOne has been growing quite a bit," said John White, the credit union's management information systems officer and network administrator. To keep growing "we really need to have reliable systems."
Networked storage systems are more efficient, Mr. White said. Compellent's "allows us to take all the disk storage, use it in a pool of storage, and allocate it to servers as we need it."
Storage networks connect a centrally managed storage system to numerous less-powerful client computers. Mr. White said that the credit union is now using low-cost servers, and that the Compellent system "will pay for itself in reduced hardware costs alone."
One advantage of the storage network, he said, is its disaster-recovery capability, which he has already had the opportunity to test.
The data can be quickly replicated if a single server goes down, Mr. White said. In one case, when the credit union was moving a server to a new location and a two-terabyte block of data became corrupt, it took only 15 minutes to restore the information, he said. "It's almost instantaneous."
The data were reproduced without a full system backup, Mr. White said. Compellent calls this feature Data Instant Replay, but he said the more common term is "snapshot."
TeaLeaf Software Tracks Wells Portal
Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco is using software that monitors customers' online sessions to fine-tune its commercial banking Web site.
Danny Peltz, executive vice president of wholesale Internet and treasury solutions, said Wells has been using software from TeaLeaf Technology Inc. of San Francisco since late 2003 to track interactions with its Commercial Electronic Office, which connects clients to a variety of services.
More than 110,000 people, at 70% of Wells' 25,000 commercial customers, use the portal to connect to its treasury, trust, brokerage, and international banking services," Mr. Peltz said. In December, for instance, corporate clients used the portal to execute $247 billion in wire transfers, he said.
"This has become an overwhelmingly popular and important channel for us," he said.
TeaLeaf's RealiTea software enables Wells representatives to replay user sessions. "It was the only one that would give us a true view of the customer's experience - where you clicked, what your experience was," Mr. Peltz said. "If there are any problems, we can do a quick diagnosis."
What actually happens in user sessions can be a surprise, he said. "We do an extensive amount of user testing," he said, "but once you launch a new service, customers use it the way they want to use it."
Employees replaying a session have no access to sensitive customer data, and the recordings are erased four to six weeks after the original session, Mr. Peltz said.
"We do make modifications to the user interface based on what we see the users doing," he said. "It's a very good complement to all our other tools."
