Syntel Delivers the Power of Open Source Computing to Financial Services Giant with Jaspersoft BI Solution

The Client

One of the world’s largest diversified financial services companies.

Business Challenge

The customer’s reporting solution was responsible for generating reports on more than 1 million financial transactions submitted each month by its B2B partners.  These reports were used not only to support the customer’s financial audits and end-of-day processing, but also to supply the data necessary for their risk management analytics. It did the job, but unfortunately the product vendor was phasing out support for the version they had installed. 

In order to keep this critical system running smoothly, the client would be forced to upgrade to a newer version – which meant higher licensing fees, a time-consuming and costly upgrade project, and potential infrastructure bottlenecks during the upgrade process. Even worse, the new version did not support the client’s storage architecture.

What they needed was a feature-rich reporting tool that offered easy deployment and maintenance, robust self-service capabilities and enhanced end-user productivity, ideally while saving money on licensing fees as well as support and maintenance costs.

The Solution

The client was open to exploring new software tools to support the system, but laid out a series of requirements that any new product had to adhere to:

• Retain all features offered by the old tool,  with the possibility to add new features later
• Deliver “pixel perfect” printer-ready reports 
• Avoid making any changes to the underlying databases or interfaces 
• Easy-to-use user interface for regular tasks such as report viewing, folder and file management, as well as complex administrative tasks like security management, performance log monitoring and scheduling

The customer asked Syntel to explore several alternative reporting solutions according to their features, functionality and security, and by using database queries and stored procedures from the current system to evaluate the output and performance of each new solution.  In the end, Syntel settled on Jaspersoft, a powerful open source BI solution.  The client agreed with Syntel’s recommendation based on Jaspersoft’s advantages, such as:

• Open and transparent code that enables the development of custom features 
• The flexibility to embed the product into application modules
• Delivers both web-based and pixel-perfect printer-ready output
• Scalable up to multi-server, enterprise-wide deployments 
• More flexible licensing terms, with an unlimited number of end user licenses
• Lower support and maintenance costs

Once the new tool was identified, Syntel stepped in to execute the project.  Syntel had complete ownership of the project with support from Jaspersoft, from Proof of Concept through installation, migrating more than 350 users and 13,000+ historical reports as well as executing testing, producing documentation for the new system and phasing out the old product. Syntel also trained the customer’s users, developed several new custom features and integrated them into the solution.

Results

In addition to cutting their licensing costs in half, the customer was impressed with the powerful reporting offered by Jaspersoft as well as the improved performance of the new solution. The customer estimates that they will save more than $500,000 in the next three years on licensing and maintenance costs, and nearly $1 million on hardware and infrastructure by saving database server space and a 40% reduction in CPU usage.

They have also laid the groundwork to leverage the power of open source solutions like Jaspersoft to achieve similar results in other systems and applications across the enterprise.