Stater NV Streamlines Enterprise with JAMS

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Stater (www.Stater.com) was founded in January 1997 as an independent service provider in the mortgage market, after starting life as part of Bouwfonds Hypotheken. Stater has since grown to become an international force in the market with over 600 employees, a head office in Amersfoort and branches in Bonn, Germany and Brussels, Belgium.

THE CHALLENGES

Stater is the end-to-end service provider for the European mortgage market. In its fulfillment of this role, Stater focuses on support for mortgage financiers in the sale, processing and financing of mortgage portfolios. Stater relies heavily on batch processing to handle all of the financial transactions for its customers.

Prior to using JAMS, Stater was using a combination of tools on various platforms to handle their batch scheduling requirements. Its core batch processing requirements ran on an OpenVMS platform using CA Scheduler. Stater also relied on Windows Task Scheduler for their Windows jobs and SQL Server Agent for their database processes.

Stater not only wanted to move their core batch scheduling system to a Windows platform but also needed to centrally manage all of these decentralized tasks and processes. In the past, many different groups were allowed to run their own batch jobs and there was no way of centrally tracking when jobs ran, if the jobs ran successfully, and who was actually responsible for specific jobs when/if they failed.

THE SOLUTIONS

After evaluating CA’s Windows solution, open source solutions and a solution being offered by a local integrator in the Netherlands, Stater selected JAMS. Sander Vos, Project Manager at Stater, states “The primary reason for selecting JAMS was the fact that JAMS supported every platform and application that we were using. Windows, OpenVMS, Informatica PowerCenter, SQL, and Sybase – JAMS handles it all. The native PowerShell support in JAMS is a very powerful tool that can assist us with automating just about anything under the sun.”

“We selected JAMS primarily for its security model that separates who can run a job from who the job runs as. Everything else was icing on the cake. The setups are very powerful. SSH support has been very helpful and has allowed us to automate certain functions on our SAN.”

A field support engineer went to Stater for one week to assist with the implementation and training on JAMS. Sander Vos added “While the learning curve was steep, once we saw all of the possibilities with JAMS, we knew we made the right decision.” One of the biggest tasks that Stater faced was converting very complex workflows from OpenVMS into JAMS. “We worked with one of JAM’s developers who assisted us immensely in converting critical workflows into JAMS and it went very well.”

THE BENEFITS

“JAMS is centrally managing every batch process that is run across our organization,” states Sander Vos of Stater. “It’s a tremendous improvement over the way things used to be done. We are spending a lot less time focusing on our batch load knowing that JAMS is handling it and, if anything goes wrong, JAMS alerts us instantly.”

“JAMS has been great to work with. They are very quick in responding to our support calls and emails. When we have asked for new features and enhancements, they have responded by putting these requests into new releases of JAMS. We couldn’t be happier with how things have turned out.”