Infotech Lead Asia: Dell Services announced the successful completion of the project of helping Singapore Exchange (SGX) with streamlining IT operations and lowering its cost-per-transaction rates, while preparing it to address future market growth.
SGX noted an improvement in the speed of a critical application by up to 100 percent, significantly lower annual operating costs and better positioning of IT systems to align with future business initiatives.
Singapore exchange had chosen Clerity solutions for its $3 million USD modernization project in 2011. Clerity solutions was acquired by Dell in April last year as a part of its plan to expand its services capabilities to help customers manage the increasing complexity of IT, including the ability to support growing volumes of data, streamline processes and ease the transition to cloud-based solutions.
SGX is among the world’s largest exchanges and is Asia’s second-largest listed exchange, with a market capitalization of more than US $6 billion and offers the region’s longest trading hours.
Dell helped migrate SGX’s entire mainframe complex, including key applications like clearing and settlement, third-party tools and utilities, and server and storage resources to a flexible open systems environment with minimum customer impact.
After considering rewriting its mainframe applications; upgrading its mainframe; and re-hosting its applications to a modern, open platform SGX opted to re-host its application environment. Mainframe re-hosting turned out to be the most cost-effective solution and involved less risk than rewriting.
As part of the evaluation process, SGX conducted a proof of concept and reference checks with large financial institutions like NYSE Euronext, where Dell had performed similar work.
Dell Mainframe Re-hosting software and Dell Enterprise COBOL was leveraged in the project to migrate SGX’s IBM CICS applications, keeping the batch JCL code, COBOL programs and VSAM data intact. This approach helped avoid costly code changes. SGX clients were able to continue accessing its systems without reconfiguration.
Dell Mainframe Re-hosting technology has been deployed in more than 50 countries and has lowered annual IT operating costs approximately 30 to 70 percent for many organizations, while providing a flexible path forward for mission-critical mainframe application and data investments.
This 15-month project concluded in October, enabling SGX to implement a scalable, industry-standard platform as part of its endeavor to future proof its IT systems. Phase two of the project has commenced with the main focus on making the introduction and adoption of new SGX products easy.
