When in Rome, do as the Romans. Go with Genero.
Rome, Italy – October 16, 2012 – The Cassa Nazionale Di Previdenza E Assistenza Dei Dottori Commecialisti (CNPADC) – The National Pension and Providence Fund of Chartered Accountants– announced the deployment of a brand new version of its contributions accounting application “SAT” October 1, 2012, using IBM® Informix Genero. The application supports over 20,000 accountants at roll-out and will grow to over 65,000 in the coming months.
The application suite manages the financial and welfare services for the nation’s chartered accountants and maintains availability for member’s annual records on-line for 80 years. Over 150 employees use the system.
“This product was designed for us,” said Gaetano Mungari, Head of Organization at CNPADC. “We stopped looking for a solution to our problem when we found Genero. Genero Studio helped improve developer productivity by 50% alone and we will use it for new applications next year.
Mr. Mungari was searching for a modern replacement to his 18 year old Informix 4GL applications – understandably beginning to show the signs of age. As a faithful IBM customer, his first port of call was their web site and therein laid the answer to his problem.
“We could have rewritten the application,” said Mungari, “but at what cost? We have a team of 17 people and there was no way we could redevelop such a complex set of applications in-house while maintaining them at the same time. When we found Genero, we knew it was the right solution. And we wanted to stay with Informix. We have a lot of investment in that skill set. It was our main argument with the board of directors.”
“We had a big scalability problem with the old system. We let 65,000 chartered accountants manage their own accounts over the web; the concurrent load can sometimes reach thousands. The proof of concept using web services took 3 days to show we had found the solution to our problem. It was a very easy decision to make.”
Aside scalability, Mungari also needed to better integrate applications with the rest of the systems and the outside world. Genero’s support for web services was another important factor in the decision; they were used to streamline front and back end processes via an application server to improve robustness and throughput.
IBM and Four Js partner Strhold assisted with the proof of concept, calling upon Datamar for help with the design of the web services.
The contributions accounting module was selected for the prototype as it was the most visible, critical and visited application. If Genero could handle that load, then it would work everywhere. Genero ‘flew’ with flying colours.
The applications run on an impressive server set-up. No less than 2 IBM Power 750s each with 8 core processors configured with 156 GB RAM and 14TB of disk storage house the application suite.
A dual layer firewall protects the installation from the outside world and a third Power 750 is used for development and testing purposes. The system makes use of virtual machines and is configured for High Availability Clustered Multi-Processing.
The management team that made it possible, from left to right: Paula Castelluccio (CNPADC), Alberto Piemontese (CNPADC), Marco Colli (STRHOLD), Corrado Ciotti (CNPADC), Enrico Schenone (DATAMAR) and Gaetano Mungari (CNPADC).
About CNPADC
The National Pension and Providence Fund of Chartered Accountants (CNPADC) is a private, non-profit institution responsable for the social security and welfare of Italy’s Chartered Accountants and their families.
The CNPADC was conceived in 1963 as an offshoot of the public administration, but was privatised by Legislative Decree no. 509/1994 in 1995. It remains under government supervision at the Ministry of Labour and Economy to ensure a long term balance for its member’s pension plans. The Italian Government provides no financial support.
® IBM and Informix are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corp.
® Genero is a registered trademark of Four Js Development Tools Ltd.
