Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Mortgage Company Cashes in on Web Services: Page 16 of 16

The mainframes--two IBM Cluster 1350s--are one of two Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex configurations in North America, and have more than 770 MIPS of processing power between them. They process more than 5,000 batch jobs each day. These two mainframes aren't going the way of the dodo anytime soon--given Freddie Mac's transaction volumes, it still makes sense to use them. "We absolutely need the mainframe for some high-volume transactions and some of the newer applications we're looking at," says Kim Petty, VP of sourcing and servicing in Freddie Mac's business information services group.

Part of the reason is the complexity of Freddie Mac's interlocking applications. "We have more than 350 different applications," Petty says. "Understanding how all those applications fit together to deliver capabilities to our customers wasn't easy, and each of them plays a critical role in how we do business." Petty needed to figure out the various linkages and "touchpoints" before she could begin to replace these mainframe programs with Web counterparts.

"In some cases, our legacy apps do things we had no clue about," Petty says. "For example, we are now building a Web-based mortgage servicing engine, and we are finding out the mainframe one is doing things to handle mortgage defaults that we didn't expect. Now we have to make sure that this piece is taken care of someplace else."