First Union Goes Live With Enterprise Data Warehousing On Informix Database

Business Wire, June 8, 1998

MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 8, 1998--

Scalability and Performance of Informix's Single

Database Architecture Key to First Union's Customer Target Marketing Program

Informix(R) Corporation (NASDAQ: IFMX), the leading developer of innovative database technology, announced today that First Union Corporation, the sixth largest holding company in the country with $220 billion in assets, has launched an enterprise-wide data warehouse running on Informix's single database architecture, Informix Dynamic Server(TM) with the Advanced Decision Support Option(TM) and the Extended Parallel Option(TM). The enterprise data warehouse is loaded with data on First Union's 16 million customers, and several data marts are under development to extract and analyze the data. Operating on an IBM POWERparallel SP, the data warehouse supports 115 nodes and is expected to grow to four terabytes.

The Informix-driven data warehouse is key to First Union's Knowledge-based Marketing program, an enterprise-wide effort in customer-centered marketing, designed to build deep, long-lasting relationships that will give First Union a competitive business advantage in an industry challenged by non-banks, new technologies, and mergers/acquisitions. "To maintain our business advantage, we need to differentiate ourselves from other institutions through service -- and service comes from knowing your customers," explained Naras Eechambadi, senior vice president of Knowledge-Based Marketing at First Union, a marketing organization formed in 1995 to develop the the company's world-class data warehouse. "The Informix-driven data warehouse will allow us to better serve our customers by coordinating customer communications, developing one-to-one marketing relationships, and overall, helping our customers better meet their financial objectives. First Union expects to increase revenue over $100 million annually when the data warehouse and related data marts are fully operational. "

The data warehouse is designed to maintain 24 months of customer data from throughout First Union, including customer account transaction and demographic information from most of the organization's principal retail and commercial businesses. Currently, 20 data sources feed into the data warehouse, including Automated Teller Machines (ATM), Demand Deposit Accounts (DDA), brokerage, credit card, mortgage, and vehicle leasing. The data warehouse has been developed for retail consumer banking with plans to add the commercial side of the business at a later date.

"Informix has the unique ability to support a data warehouse implementation --consisting of small single node data marts along with massively parallel enterprise data warehouses -- on the same database technology, which minimizes and protects our customers' investment in hardware, software, and application development resources," said Chuck Ballard, senior marketing manager at Informix. "They can grow their systems with less worry, and focus on their real goal -- providing customer service and achieving the best possible ROI."

Initially, users from First Union's Knowledge-Base Marketing and other groups will be able to analyze the data to track trends and buying behavior of customers for more effective target marketing and customer service. By better understanding its customers, First Union will be able to identify customer needs well in advance of their requests, and develop products and services to target new customers and retain existing customers.

In forming its data warehousing strategy, First Union required an integrated source of high quality data and a flexible database platform to effectively grow with new business. "With over 70 acquisitions in the last 10 years, it is mission critical that we have the best database system to support our continued growth," stated Eechambadi. "We are confident that we can grow to 200 nodes, and the Informix environment will support it with increased performance. We are very pleased with Informix's support through the development of this complex project."

First Union chose Informix database technology over other database providers to power its enterprise data warehouse. The Informix platform was specifically chosen for its scalability and superior performance running on the IBM POWERparallel System SP, which is capable of storing and rapidly processing large volumes of data. Informix's single database architecture with Advanced Decision Support Option and Extended Parallel Option allows First Union to easily and cost-effectively scale from the smallest data mart to its large enterprise data warehouse.

Informix's Advanced Decision Support Option extends the base functionality of Informix Dynamic Server to support query-intensive, complex, analytical applications. It offers a set of high-end data warehousing features to enable fast data access, analysis, and management. The Advanced Decision Support Option delivers optimized performance across any parallel hardware architecture -- from symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers to the largest massively parallel processing (MPP) systems. Informix's Extended Parallel Option provides the industry leading performance and scaleability required with very large database architectures. It features a completely shared-nothing design, offering proven near-linear scaleability to hundreds of processors for the highest performance on terabytes of business data.