Contact:
Karen Colson
karen@summa-tech.com
412.258.3294
Summa
Pittsburgh, PA (April 25, 2006) - Summa announced the completion of a performance enhancement project at Fiserv Customer Centered Solutions (CCS), a business unit of Fiserv, Inc. (Nasdaq: FISV). The project improved overall system performance by an average factor of 20 for the most common "IntelligEnt" transactions, and the project's rigorous testing program validated that Fiserv's next product release, scheduled for April 28, would support a significantly increased user base.
Fresh on the heels of releasing its new flagship product, IntelligEnt, a suite of business tools for banks and credit unions, Fiserv set the bar even higher for its next planned product release. They anticipated aggressive growth, including a new customer that would bring on board 10 times the current number of concurrent users. Although the Fiserv CCS team was confident in IntelligEnt, they wanted to ensure that the end user experience and overall customer satisfaction would remain high at this newest deployment. They needed to validate that IntelligEnt would scale sufficiently and perform well at high usage loads. Equally important, Fiserv CCS wanted to make sure IntelligEnt was architected so that it could potentially shift from being a point solution to a hosted model in a future product release.
"Through a repeatable performance testing framework that Summa established, we were able to show that IntelligEnt was scalable," said John Puccetti, Vice President of Product and Technology for Fiserv CCS, adding, "This was a significant milestone in the IntelligEnt product's life and validated our architecture and design. Now we're confident that we can scale to serve customers with multiple thousands of users." Not only was performance faster, Puccetti said, but system memory requirements were reduced and the user experience was not compromised. Summa's work improved overall system performance by an average factor of 20 for the most common "IntelligEnt" transactions.
"Fast performance is crucial to Fiserv's customers because they rely on IntelligEnt - an enterprise relationship system for finanical institutions - for mission-critical information that supports contact, relationship and information management, sales force automation, analytics, business process management and business intelligence. In practical terms, with IntelligEnt, users can handle actions like stopping a check payment, opening an account, conducting a financial transaction, tracking customer interactions, and managing sales opportunities. In order to help sell additional services, banks and credit unions use IntelligEnt so they can quickly access key customer data while in the midst of conducting business with that individual. That enables the bank or credit union to suggest other appropriate services to the customer while he or she is still standing at the teller window, or engaged in a specific online transaction.
"What we were initially looking for was a baseline performance measurement. We were pleased that Summa was able to also improve performance at the same time." Puccetti added, "Summa's technicians have a strong architectural awareness which is what differentiates them from a traditional staff augmentation firm. Not only do their people have good depth and breadth of technical knowledge, but they also excel at designing and building extensible, open architecture systems."
About Fiserv Customer Centered Solutions
Fiserv Customer Centered Solutions (CCS), a unit of Fiserv, Inc. provides software solutions that enable financial institutions and service providers to drive profit by effectively leveraging information technology. The CCS business unit functions as a software product development company that produces solution suites used by financial institutions and credit unions worldwide. Fiserv CCS can be found on the Internet at http://www.ccs.fiserv.com.
About Fiserv®
Fiserv, Inc. (Nasdaq: FISV) provides information management systems and services to the financial and health benefits industries, including transaction processing, business process outsourcing and software and systems solutions. The company serves more than 17,000 clients worldwide, including banks, credit unions, financial planners and investment advisers, insurance companies and agents, self-funded employers, lenders and savings institutions. Headquartered in Brookfield, Wis., Fiserv reported $4.1 billion in total revenue for 2005. Fiserv was ranked the largest provider of information technology services to the U.S. financial services industry in the 2004 and 2005 FinTech 100 survey by the American Banker newspaper and the Financial Insights research firm. Fiserv can be found on the Internet at http://www.fiserv.com.
About Summa
Since 1996, Summa has been providing high-impact IT consulting services and customized, commercial-grade software development for companies ranging from regional businesses to Global 2000 firms. Summa specializes in helping companies evaluate and implement IT modernization strategies to better meet their business objectives. Whether a business needs a web accessible interface to a mission-critical application, to renovate legacy systems, or to connect existing applications, Summa can help. Summa is an IBM Premier Business Partner, a BEA Select Level Partner and a Microsoft Certified Partner. In addition to the corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh, Summa maintains a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil.