The Landrum Company: Improved Functionality with Open Systems

Landrum Company is an $850 million holding company for four full-service banks serving consumers and businesses in the central United States. When it needed increased functionality from its existing platform, Sun and Kirchman provided the solution. Kirchman rehosted Landrum's existing applications and data to the Solaris Operating Environment version of its Kirchman Bankway software, meeting all of Landrum's goals and expectations, including a one-weekend transition to the new system with substantial cost savings and performance improvements.

Sun MTP software and open systems servers enable low-cost, high-performance bank operations

When the Landrum Company, a Missouri-based bank holding company, wanted greater functionality than its existing platform could provide, they turned to Kirchman Corporation and Sun for a cost-effective, open systems solution. Kirchman rehosted Landrum's existing applications and data to the Solaris Operating Environment version of its Kirchman Bankway software, meeting all of Landrum' s goals and expectations, including a one-weekend transition to the new system with substantial cost savings and performance improvements.

Kirchman: 17-year record of satisfaction at Landrum

Landrum is an $850 million holding company for four full-service banks serving consumers and businesses in the central United States. The largest of the four is First National Bank and Trust Company in Columbia, Missouri, Landrum's headquarters. The other three banks serve small to mid-sized communities in southern Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma.

Kirchman Corporation is one of the banking industry's leaders in automation and compliance. Kirchman Bankway is the culmination of a 33-year commitment to serving the dynamic needs of the financial industry. Its three-tiered architecture can put everything a bank wants to know about its customers at the fingertips of every banker from the CEO to the teller. Utilized in more than 1,000 of the world's highest performing financial institutions, Kirchman and its software are designed to meet the needs of any bank, from the smallest de novo to the largest multi-billion dollar holding company.

Landrum has used Kirchman Corporation software for its core banking needs since 1985, when Landrum chose the Kirchman suite for First National Bank and Trust Company after a concerted evaluation of core banking software alternatives. The choice of Kirchman worked out so well for the Columbia headquarters that Landrum soon implemented the same solution for all its other banks. When Kirchman migrated the Kirchman Bankway software to run on the feature-rich Sun platform, Landrum considered its alternatives: switch to a different core banking application, continue to upgrade the mainframe, or move to Sun.

"We took a fresh look at the core banking field and concluded that Kirchman Bankway was the right solution for us," said Jim Stock, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President for Landrum. "We determined that our total cost of ownership would be minimized by sticking with Kirchman. That left us with two alternatives. We weren't very pleased with the cost of upgrading our existing computer hardware, whose maintenance costs and operating system licensing fees were already a lot more expensive than UNIX."

Sun becomes Kirchman's UNIX standard

Before selecting the Sun platform, Kirchman Corporation was immersed in an evaluation of vendors to become its new UNIX platform of choice. "We looked hard at Sun, and the more we looked the more we saw that Sun was a technology partner for us," said Rachel Landrum, President, of Kirchman Corporation (no relation to Landrum Company). "We were particularly impressed with Sun's scalability, reliability, and conserving our customers' budgets. The clincher was Sun's acquisition of the Sun Mainframe Transaction Processing software (MTP), which was the solution we'd been using to rehost our mainframe applications and data to UNIX."

Sun Mainframe Transaction Processing software provides a cost effective alternative to CICS. Sun MTP provides a low-cost, high-performance CICS transaction processing environment on Sun servers supporting Cobol, PL/1, C and Java technology applications accessing either VSAM or relational data files. Sun MTP is the cornerstone of Sun's Mainframe Rehosting Program. Kirchman Corporation shared its Sun plans with Landrum, which was quick to become the first bank to choose the Kirchman Bankway on Sun combination. "The Sun alternative was the solution to several problems," said Stock. "It gave us all the new application functionality we were seeking while saving costs in many areas compared with the existing platform—maintenance, operating system license fees, floor space, electricity, and more. As a bonus, we got Sun's reliability, scalability and performance."

Kirchman Corporation, with assistance from Sun, migrated its Bankway software from the existing hardware platform to the Sun open systems platform. When that was complete, Kirchman turned its attention to Landrum to convert the bank's systems to the newly migrated Bankway application. Landrum moved from the mainframe environment to a Sun Fire V880 server running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment. The bank's databases and files reside on Sun StorEdge T3 disk arrays and are backed up onto a Sun StorEdge DLT tape library. All Sun equipment is protected by Sun Support Services at the SunSpectrum Gold level.

Kirchman also managed other aspects of the migration including the replacement of 160 teller desktop machines, the training of 200 tellers in the use of the new application functionality, and network administrator instruction.

After one weekend, existing mainframe is unplugged

Conversion to the new system occurred over a single weekend. "Kirchman told us they'd get it all done over the weekend," reported Stock. "We didn't expect they could do it that quickly, and so we were prepared to run the banks manually on Monday. We didn't have to do that, however. They succeeded in getting everything up and running by Monday morning. In fact, Kirchman did an outstanding job throughout the project, as did Sun's support people in the background. Within two days we'd developed enough confidence in the new system that we unplugged the mainframe and shipped it back to the vendor."

"The project was a complete success by any measure," added Stock. "Because the new system runs so much faster than the mainframe, and because we no longer have to handle up to 25 tapes per day, we've speeded up our end-of-day updates by 30 percent. That saves a lot of labor costs, which is on top of the $100K per year savings we're seeing in maintenance costs and operating system license fees. Furthermore, since we're now UNIX based and well trained in supporting the network, we anticipate being able to deal with system issues ourselves that required us to pay our former hardware vendor substantial fees in the past. We're even saving on floor space since the Sun system takes up only about 30 percent of the room that the old equipment required. Our electric bill is lower, too. Network administration is simplified, and so is teller operation. The new Kirchman Bankway functionality is having a positive effect on customer satisfaction."

Landrum Company found one more way to help save money with Sun. When the existing mainframe was in place, they engaged a third party to provide disaster recovery services. "Sun suggested in one of our meetings that we consider placing a backup server offsite instead of relying on the third party," said Stock. "We did the calculations and found that a second Sun Fire server would cost less than the third party was going to charge us. So we now have a backup server at a location in Oklahoma. Not only are we saving money, but we have more control over our own destiny if something were to happen to our primary system."

"We're also delighted with the Sun system's reliability and scalability," Stock continued. "The availability has been very high."

The Landrum Company success propelled the Sun-Kirchman relationship, which was already very strong, to a new level. "We've made the strategic decision to focus our Kirchman Bankway UNIX offering on the Sun/MTP platform, and we're highly optimistic about the business we'll see as a result," said Landrum. "Sun has been a terrific technology partner. They provided great support during the Landrum migration, embraced us in their Sun Partner Advantage Program, and are helping with our goto- market activities. As the only core banking application available on Sun platforms, we have a strong competitive advantage."

"We're extremely pleased with our decision to become the first Kirchman Bankway on Sun customer," concluded Stock. "Sun and Kirchman met or exceeded every expectation we had. Not only are we saving costs in many ways, but we're providing customer service that's better than ever."