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Vehicle finance company MTF is replicating data in real-time across different databases and operating systems in order to deliver better customer experience. MTF was formed in 1970 to enable a group of motor vehicle dealers to offer car loans to their customers. Since that time the company has expanded throughout the country including establishing 40 franchise operators. Annually the company writes around $400 million of new loans.
Loan finance markets are increasingly competitive and MTF differentiates through a combination of price and service quality enabled by technology. A good service example being; same day loan pay-out enabled through streamlined processing.
MTF’s core applications run on an IBM i DB2 database. The need for 24/7 web sites created a requirement for real-time data sharing to a MS SQL database. This was achieved using Double-Take Sharesoftware from Vision Solutions. Before Double Take if a loan application was created in our system it didn’t appear in the data warehouse or any of the websites until the following day.
"Now we achieve that in real time” Double-Take® Share™ makes it easy to capture, transform, enhance, and replicate data across multiple databases, operating systems and physical, virtual or cloud platforms. While the data is being replicated, it is being transformed and mapped based on rules that MTF have defined and stored in a replication model. As only the data changes are replicated, bandwidth requirements are low."
“Basically it’s just a live replication of all our data from within our core finance application that we can then point other applications to, such as our websites. Because this data sits outside of our core system in a kind of cache even if our core system goes offline all of our other applications keep working because all of the data we’re accessing is stored in the Double Take Share’s table.We recently implemented a new website where customers can log in and view their customer account details. This relies on the replicated data and is being hit continuously however it performs really well. It’s sophisticated software so the four day training session was well worthwhile. I’d say it took us a month or two to get things running just the way we wanted. Now it just sits there and works however I also say that there is a lot more that we could do with it”
Web sites and the data warehouse sharing production system data in real-time
24x7 web site availability for MTF customers
Reduced processing load on the IBM i system
Simplified and faster development – now using a SQL DB rather than DB2
