Fiserv CBS Worldwide is a unit of Fiserv Inc., a Fortune 500 company that serves more than 18,000 clients in 66 countries around the world. Fiserv CBS Worldwide delivers end-to-end business and technology solutions for retail financial organizations, consumer finance institutions, and credit unions throughout Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States.

The company’s Aperio product, which Fiserv built using the Microsoft Application Platform, including SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), is a customer interaction management solution that helps streamline sales and service operations to improve efficiency and optimize the customer experience. Where fulfillment work stems from customer interactions, Aperio manages workflow end-to-end across banks' front, middle and back offices.

With more than 18,000 clients in 66 countries worldwide, Fiserv wanted to test its Aperio solution to ensure it would scale to 10,000 concurrent users. In June 2007, Fiserv brought its Aperio 6.0 application to the Microsoft Test Labs in Sammamish, Washington for testing carried out by a team from Fiserv and Microsoft working together to create an environment that replicated real-world demand.

"We brought along real data, and even brought an IBM iSeries to more completely match a production environment," says Andrew Steadman, Director of Strategy for Fiserv CBS. "We wanted to replicate what our clients would experience, which meant interacting with a core banking system on a real-time basis."

In addition to the iSeries-based core banking system, the test bed included using 10 Aperio application servers and 2 Communicator servers, deployed on server computers using 64-bit multi-core Intel Itanium processors. The Intel-based server computers, built on Intel Core micro architecture, were chosen over other architectures because they provide a cost-effective foundation for delivering innovative performance and energy efficiency features that provides scalability, reliability and performance to accurately and quickly extract and analyze data.

Fiserv found that the Microsoft Application Platform and SQL Server 2005 provided the company with the scalability it needed to support more than 10,000 concurrent users. The company is also benefitting from the ability to easily customize Aperio for each customer's deployment, a better view of the business from using Reporting Services, and the offline capabilities provided by SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for teller solutions.

The testing found that the scalability of SQL Server enables Fiserv to approach larger customers that had been expressing interest in the solution. "We are already supporting clients with 6,000 to 7,000 concurrent users. We were very happy to exceed 10,000 concurrent users in our SQL Server testing," says Steadman. "This positions us to confidently provide our solution to the world's largest financial institutions."

Steadman notes that during the lab testing the company identified ways in which it could tune its solution to grow substantially beyond the 10,000+ concurrent users it supported in the lab. To read the complete case study, go to http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000001342.