Oracle Exadata saves finance group time

Oracle this week announced that its Exadata Database Machine and suite of applications were up and running for the Australian Finance Group (AFG)and its thousands of members.

Created in 1994 as a financial aggregator, AFG is a mortgage broking group with more than 2500 members across Australia and a budget of $50 billion in mortgage finances to manage. Last year, the group spent about $1 million on Oracle's solutions in a move that aimed to achieve cost and time effectiveness when processing brokers' commissions. According to Oracle, it used to take 37 hours to process commission payments to brokers, while it now takes less than nine hours.

Being a long-time Oracle customer, AFG selected Oracle Exadata for the next five years. The deployment of the Exadata Database Machine will sustain the implementation of Oracle's Siebel CRM, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the Oracle E-Business Suite. Also, it will allow the use of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition for information management.

AFG executive director Malcolm Watkins said data communication services were improving in Australia and that therefore AFG needs new technologies to deliver its services better.

"At AFG we pride ourselves on using leading-edge technologies to harness competitive advantage," he said. "Over the past three years, we have seen a quantum shift by brokers from the CRM mobile client to the web client as data communication services improve across Australia."

"Without the Oracle CRM system, they cannot write their residential mortgages, meaning lost opportunities for both them and us," he said. "Exadata offers high system performance and availability to our brokers, so in effect we offer 'On demand' CRM to our brokers."

Watkins added that the pre-integrated solution helped to reduce deployment time and that Oracle fully assisted AFG in the process. "We would not have been able to deploy in such a short timeframe without a pre-integrated and optimised hardware and software solution," he said.

Oracle ANZ Technologies sales vice president Robert Gosling said AFG would benefit from the deployment of an integrated hardware and software solution. "By selecting hardware and software that is engineered to work together AFG has reduced the complexity of their IT infrastructure and are able to manage more data, improve performance of all applications, and make better business decisions in real time," he said.

According to Oracle, the AFG is also using Oracle Real Application Testing, Oracle Partitioning, Oracle Resource Manager and Instant Caging.