Financial Services Company Builds Future Scalability and Speed Into Upgrade

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Customer Solution Case Study

Financial Services Company Builds Future Scalability and Speed into Upgrade

Overview “[Our database] will grow dramatically this Country or Region: United States year….We wanted to get into a 64-bit platform early Industry: Financial Services so we minimize any performance issues down the Customer Profile road.” Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Guidant Financial Group is a forward- Art Lovestedt, Chief Information Officer, Guidant Financial Group thinking financial services company that offers nontraditional solutions to Guidant Financial Group has quickly grown from its original individual investors. It has 50 employees. three cofounders to more than 50 employees in three U.S. Business Situation locations. To prepare for continued growth, the company To keep up with its exponential growth and speed payment processing, the upgraded its equipment and streamlined its services with company wanted to implement a unified, Windows® XP Professional x64-Bit Edition, Microsoft® Windows high-performance platform. Server™ 2003 Standard x64 Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server™ Solution 2005 (64-bit). The new solution provides seamless integration Guidant upgraded its infrastructure with Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 x64 from the guidantfinancial.com Web site to the payment Edition, Windows® XP Professional x64- processor and back-office systems. By implementing TPI Bit Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 (64-bit). Software SmartPayments Server software, Guidant is able to speed payment processing by 400 percent. As the company Benefits  Seamless integration continues to acquire more customer accounts, the technology  Easy scalability will scale easily to support the growth. This forward-thinking  400 percent boost in payment processing approach, which is a core value of Guidant, will help the  Cost savings company better serve its customers and stay ahead of its competition. Situation One of the challenges was accepting Guidant Financial Group is a financial payments. services company that establishes retirement account structures for According to Art Lovestedt, Chief individuals who want to invest their IRA and Information Officer at Guidant, “Originally, 401(k) funds into we had a single credit card terminal from nontraditional investments like commercial which to process credit card transactions. and residential real estate, businesses, and As we quickly grew, this solution just didn’t franchises. Based in Bellevue, Washington, scale. Another issue we ran into was credit the company has over 50 employees and card merchant fees (around 2 percent of has rolled over U.S.$300 million in each transaction). Our average ticket item retirement funds since 2003. It is on pace is in the thousands of dollars, so having the to roll over $400 million this year alone. ability to process ACH transactions through TPI SmartPayments Server would save us A technically savvy company, Guidant had quite a bit of money.” written most of its own applications in- house using Microsoft® .NET connection The company’s IT group began exploring software. Guidant created its own the possibility of upgrading the system to enterprise resource planning (ERP) system better handle current transactions and to to process a customer’s self-directed anticipate continued growth. In particular, retirement account. Guidant sets up a Guidant wanted to integrate its applications customized retirement account for the more tightly and make sure its technology customer along with a new business, for would scale as the company expanded. example, an LLC or a C corporation, and then transfers the retirement account funds Says Lovestedt, “Our biggest internal issue to the company in exchange for stock. is the rapid growth of our database. It will Guidant processes all the legal paperwork grow dramatically this year from a couple to meet regulations set forth by both ERISA hundred megabytes to many gigabytes, and Internal Revenue Code, and provides and we will start running analytical ongoing support to the customer. This processes on that data to get a better highly complex process requires anywhere understanding of what our business is from 15 to 45 days to complete, and doing. We wanted to get into a 64-bit Guidant relies on several applications to platform early on so that we minimize any accomplish the task. There was no unified potential performance issues down the interface—Guidant employees had to move road.” from one application to another. Solution In addition, Guidant has experienced rapid As part of its system upgrade, Guidant growth, rolling over $70 million in 2004 and selected the Windows® XP Professional $140 million in 2005, and is on pace to roll x64-Bit Edition and Microsoft® Windows over $400 million in 2006. As the volume of Server™ 2003 Standard x64 Edition customers increased, the reliability of operating systems. The company is also Guidant’s technology began decreasing. migrating its database from the 32-bit Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 to Microsoft Supermicro Intel Pentium 4 server SQL Server 2005 (64-bit) and its computers, are network load balanced. applications to the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0. Lovestedt cites the Three developers used the Microsoft Visual fact that there is no price difference Studio® 2005 Professional Edition between the 64-bit and 32-bit operating development system to upgrade the systems as a reason for the migration. technology. Everything is written in C# and “Most hardware options today allow the Microsoft ASP.NET. All Guidant installation of either 32-bit or 64-bit applications, including the custom ERP versions of Windows. Since all of our solution, are fully ported to the.NET server applications will run on 64-bit Framework 2.0. Windows, and the price is the same, 64-bit Windows was an obvious choice,” says Guidant selected the TPI Software Lovestedt. SmartPayments Server to process credit card transactions and Automated Clearing “It is a testament to 64- The solution addresses each of the four House (ACH) electronic check conversion bit Windows and the areas that Guidant separates its business from within the same application. TPI into: connecting with potential customers, SmartPayments Server provides an entire .NET Framework 2.0 selling its services to customers, payment solution, including bank routing, that we didn’t need processing customer orders, and Web reporting, virtual terminals, Web supporting customers. In a seamless flow, server integration, and SQL Server 2005 much development customers request information at the database integration. help. Also, that Guidant Web site (guidantfinancial.com). Leads are entered into a custom ERP “TPI SmartPayments Server is great Microsoft released a solution that handles the CRM functionality because it’s written in .NET, so it fits into solid version of SQL and order processing. Finally, customers our environment very well. It also has a are billed and payments are processed. A Web service interface, and with less than Server 2005 was really database retains information about five lines of code, we can process a credit beneficial to us.” customer accounts for ongoing support. card or ACH transaction from our internal system without having to know how to Art Lovestedt, Chief Information Officer, The entire network, including two Web interface all the various credit card Guidant Financial Group servers, two ERP servers, one database processors or ACH clearing houses. The server, and one payment server, is running TPI SmartPayments Server handles all that Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 for us,” says Lovestedt. Edition. Standard workstations run Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 This was the first time the Guidant IT group (32-bit), while developers are taking had written software with 64-bit technology. advantage of Windows XP Professional One developer had attended the Ascend x64 Edition Service Pack 2. Microsoft SQL program classes at Microsoft, but had not Server 2005 Service Pack 1 is loaded on a yet put the knowledge to use. Another Supermicro server computer with an Intel developer was familiar with the .NET Pentium D chip. The Web servers, both Framework 2.0. The system was already written in the having to move from application to Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1, and application, as was previously the case. Lovestedt says that porting to the .NET Framework version 2.0 was fairly easy. The With 64-bit Windows computing and the developers referred to the Microsoft forum, TPI SmartPayments Server, Guidant will the ASP.NET Web site, and MSDN to find soon be able to accept secure payments answers to questions relating to the .NET online. Its customers’ credit card and bank Framework 2.0 and 64-bit deployment. card information will be held confidentially and processed securely on the Guidant According to Lovestedt, “It is a testament to Web site. 64-bit Windows and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 that we didn’t need much Technology That Grows with the Company development help. Also, that Microsoft As Guidant continues to grow and needs to released a solid version of SQL Server increase the performance of its systems, it 2005 was really beneficial to us.” will be able to add more server computers “With 64-bit capability, and network load balance them. When the Guidant will have a Benefits internal application was originally created, it With the new solution, Guidant employees supported only CRM functions for five much higher address and customers alike will experience a employees. Two years later, it now space, so they will be seamless user experience. As the supports daily operations for over 50 company continues to acquire more employees, and it must be able to grow in able to use more customer accounts, the technology will the future with minimal developer effort. memory….The scale easily to support the growth. Business processes will run quicker According to Lovestedt, “The .NET throughput may be as because of the faster transaction Framework allows us to modularly build up much as a 400 percent processing and increased performance this application. We can continue adding inherent in the 64-bit solution. Finally, this features to it without having to completely improvement….” forward-thinking approach will result in a rebuild it. The 64-bit editions are giving us Andy Chau, Chief Technology Officer, TPI cost savings for Guidant while giving the a longer lifespan for our servers. We can Software company an advantage over its now have one server computer where we competitors. used to need two because of the higher performance we get from the 64-bit Seamless Integration architecture.” Because Guidant moved to 64-bit technology and ported its applications to Guidant is currently converting all paper the .NET Framework version 2.0, its documents into electronic documents and employees are now able to operate storing them in the database. In a few everything on one platform. Rather than months, Guidant will increase the several running multiple types of servers and hundred megabytes currently in the applications, the IT staff can focus their database to more than several hundred attention on one seamless, unified system. gigabytes, and the company expects the Employees are able to perform all aspects database size to grow quickly from there. of their jobs from one interface without “In addition to growing our database to 32 transactions per second on the 64-bit significantly, we will also make use of SQL versions, with only 20 percent CPU Reporting Services to better analyze our utilization. Chau attributes this fast data data,” says Lovestedt. “By running SQL flow between the CPU and memory to the Server in a 64-bit environment, we get wider data pipe of the 64-bit architecture. faster processing and more memory capacity. This helps prolong the life of our Guidant also runs automated e-mail current hardware and keeps the campaigns during which it sends out architecture simple. Combining all these hundreds of e-mail messages a day. The features allows us to make better informed generation and mailing of those e-mail decisions in shorter periods of time.” messages is quite CPU-intensive. By moving to a 64-bit process, Guidant 400 Percent Boost in Payment Processing reduced a 40-minute process to 5 minutes. Guidant will start billing recurring accounts As Guidant continues to grow and the this fiscal year. With the 64-bit technology number of daily e-mail messages of Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 increases, the time savings will be even Edition, SQL Server 2005, and TPI more significant. Software SmartPayments Server, With the new solution, Guidant expects to save Another process that has seen tremendous hours when doing batch payment performance gains is the encoding of processing. internal training videos with Windows Media® technology. With 64-bit technology, Andy Chau, Chief Technology Officer at encoding time is between 25 and 50 TPI Software says, “With 64-bit capability, percent faster than it was on 32-bit Guidant will have a much higher address computers. space, so they will be able to use more memory. Transaction processing works Cost Savings and Competitive Advantage with a 64-bit database a lot better. You can When Guidant needed to upgrade its load all the data into the memory and have hardware, the company decided to upgrade the data closer to the application. That its operating systems as well. Because the makes the retrieval of the data much faster. price of the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions The throughput may be as much as a 400 was the same, the technology group chose percent improvement using the database to port their applications early, before there and holding things in cache. The 64-bit was a dire business need. processor is able to handle more concurrent connections.” Lovestedt says, “It just comes back to being proactive. There’s no reason not to After implementing Windows Server 2003 do it. You’re getting more bang for your buck if you go down the 64-bit path. In the Standard x64 Edition and SQL Server 2005 long run, you’ll save a lot of money on the in its SmartPayments Server, transaction systems you need to handle the business speeds have increased from 6 to 12 processes.” transactions per second with 32-bit servers The IT development group used the same reasoning when deciding to upgrade its applications from the Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 to version 2.0. Even though they aren’t yet able to take full advantage of all the offerings in Visual Studio 2005, the .NET Framework 2.0, and 64-bit computing, by adopting these powerful technologies early, they won’t have to perform a more challenging upgrade in six months or a year.

The company continues to look forward to future technology needs. Guidant intends to keep purchasing 64-bit hardware and 64-bit operating systems. It will invest in 64-bit workstations for employees performing process-intensive work such as graphic, video, and audio editing. Guidant hopes to upgrade to a 64-bit version of Microsoft Exchange Server to take advantage of higher performance while needing only one server.

“Being proactive is one of the ways we continue to outpace the growth in our industry,” says Lovestedt. “Our company is more than doubling in size every year. We have to stay on top of things and look forward to continue this growth rate. We haven’t had any outside investment— Guidant is profitable and continues to grow organically. Being proactive is a core value for our business, and Microsoft and 64-bit technology fit right in with our plans.” For More Information Microsoft Windows Server System For more information about Microsoft Microsoft Windows Server System is a line products and services, call the Microsoft of integrated and manageable server Sales Information Center at (800) 426- software designed to reduce the complexity 9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft and cost of IT. Windows Server System Canada Information Centre at (877) 568- enables you to spend less time and budget 2495. Customers who are deaf or hard- on managing your systems so that you can of-hearing can reach Microsoft text focus your resources on other priorities for telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) you and your business. 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 For more information about Windows United States and Canada, please Server System, go to: contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about TPI Software products and services, call (425) 882- 0921 or visit the Web site at: www.tpisoft.com

For more information about Guidant Financial Group, Inc products and services, call (888) 472-4455 or visit the Web site at: www.guidantfinancial.com

Software and Services  Technologies  Microsoft Servers − Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 − Microsoft Windows Server 2003 − Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Standard x64 Edition − Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Hardware  Microsoft Visual Studio  Intel Pentium D, Pentium 4, Core Duo, − Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Centrino processors Professional Edition  Supermicro servers  Windows Media  Dell workstations  Windows XP Professional 64-Bit Edition  Toshiba laptop computers

Partners  TPI Software © 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, and Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published June 2006