Mainframe optimisation cuts processing capacity (CPU) consumption by 35% to 49%, reducing costs by 5% to 34%

Madrid, 15 January 2024. – Orizon highlights the potential of mainframe optimisation in view of the seven month-end closings on working days that financial institutions will face in 2024. The Spanish technology company draws attention to these closings, which it calls "black closings", because of the large night-time (batch) processing capacity they require, which usually overlaps with the capacity needed to keep banking operations running without incidents when branches open the next day. This will be especially acute in February and October, when the month-end falls on a Thursday, the day of the week on which banks also keep their branches open in the afternoon.

These monthly closings involve a huge volume of processes (some banks exceed 800,000), usually very heavy ones, so processing takes on average between three and ten hours. To keep it from running longer, and to meet the deadlines for delivering information to other institutions, Orizon finds that most financial institutions have to buy extra processing capacity for their infrastructure, with the corresponding increase in costs.

According to Orizon, for practically every financial institution, extending capacity is therefore the way to meet the agreed SLAs, both in form and on time, and to keep normal operations, above all online operations, from being affected, with the resulting harm to internal users and customers, not to mention the financial penalties that non-compliance can bring.

According to Ángel Pineda, CEO of Orizon, "this problem is widespread in Spanish banking because, although banks claim to be 24×7, in practice many processes have to close so that the nightly data consolidation can take place: what is known as batch in mainframe environments, where banks' core systems reside. Given that buying additional MIPS costs far more than regular MIPS," Pineda concludes, "the extra cost of these extensions is extremely onerous, without counting the reputational damage to an institution that cannot provide an adequate service to its customers."

Batch optimisation: shorter run times and guaranteed compliance

In this context, Orizon advocates optimising batch processes to reduce processing times and ensure SLA compliance without incurring extra costs. Optimisation identifies and diagnoses any inefficiency through continuous monitoring of the processes and automatic calculation of the critical paths (the set of processes that must complete correctly to produce the information needed within a given time) associated with each SLA.

Orizon's optimisation methodology also applies to distributed environments, where the problem is similar, made worse by longer batch run times and the accumulated delay.

For this, Orizon has the BOA platform, which constantly monitors the behaviour of software and ensures it runs efficiently through continuous optimisation and measurement. In addition, BOA automatically calculates the processes that influence SLA compliance, identifies the root causes of inefficiencies in batch processes (dependencies, scheduling errors, waiting times, etc.) and in other kinds of processes (code errors, software changes, loops, etc.), and proposes improvements and solutions for each SLA, identifying the components that need to change down to the line of code.

Through mainframe optimisation, Orizon reduces processing capacity (CPU) consumption by between 35% and 49%, with cost reductions of between 5% and 34%; for SLAs, it improves processes by between 40% and 66%, and the so-called critical paths by 20% on average.

According to Pineda, "besides a significant reduction in run time, batch optimisation has other benefits that our customers value highly". "This optimisation," Pineda adds, "is essential not only for financial institutions that struggle to meet their service level agreements, but also for those that want a wider compliance margin, to make sure deadlines are met and to avoid penalties and the reputational damage of poor service."