Stories about: Fiserv

"It used to take four people five days to test the software every month," says Kevin Bingham, vice president of IT at Arizona Federal Credit Union. "Now, we can do it in six hours."

Following the merger of Credit Union Australia (CUA) and the Australian National Credit Union (ANCU) on January 1, the process of integrating 400,000 customer records is being slowed by manual data mapping.

IBM Global Services on Monday announced a 12-year, $50 million IT services contract to support Fiserv in a groundbreaking cheque processing agreement with three of Australia's four largest banks. Fiserv is a leading provider of data and cheque processing services in the US.

When it comes to the mainframe, Microsoft has two distinct personalities. While the software giant would like to believe the Windows platform can replace anything that runs on the mainframe, the reality is that smaller users might want to migrate. However, many users are looking to integrate tried-and-true mainframe applications and processes with next-generation application and network architectures in the form of Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Service-oriented architectures hold out the promise of reinventing IT as we know it, according to proponents of Web services. With Web services standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for messaging and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to identify the content of a SOAP message, users are dreaming up ways to unlock information formerly trapped in legacy systems and share it across their entire IT infrastructures.

In a $3 million deal, Elcom, a credit union based about 60km north of Sydney on the NSW central coast, has dumped its 20-year-old legacy system and outsourced disaster recovery planning and management of its core software system.

Wollongong-based retail loan provider City Coast Credit Union has overhauled its entire software and hardware infrastructure as part of a multimillion-dollar business transformation strategy to better position the company in a tighter financial services market.

KAZ Computer Services has added to its stable of local outsourcing deals built up in recent months, today signing a three-year contract with retail bank Laiki Bank Australia to manage its IT infrastructure.

While copper cable remains the standard for connecting PCs to LAN hubs and switches, optical fiber may soon be the preferred way to make 10M and 100M bit/sec. Ethernet connections to corporate desktops, according to a recent study completed in July by The Tolly Group in Manasquan, N.J.

One of the hot buzz phrases in business today is strategic alliance. Everybody's building them in the hope of developing exciting new product offerings, opening doors to untapped markets and ensuring enterprise continuity. Former competitors are suddenly potential partners and old lines of demarcation between clients and vendors are becoming obscured. Yet, few alliances are truly strategic and long-term joint ventures between equal partners are as rare as hen's teeth. "Getting hitched" in business seems to have the same iffy batting average as marriage itself.