Headquartered in Rochester, Minnesota, Think Bank [1]is a full-service institution with branches throughout the Midwest. The bank specializes in home mortgages, home equity, consumer loans, Visa cards, checking and savings accounts, money markets, CDs, and financial planning. Operating under a mutual model, Think has more than 100,000 members and assets of more than $1.3 billion.

Approximately a year ago, Think was searching for a way to transfer data between disparate banking systems. Although the bank's core system was the System i, the business banking segment ran on MS SQL. Getting all the data into the System i and then copying updated files back to the MS SQL system was a daily challenge. The task of finding a PCI-compliant data-movement solution fell to Van Sy, the lead systems administrator at Think.

"We owned another product that had some FTP functionality," Sy says, "but it didn’t have the data push features that we wanted. We wanted to be able to copy just certain fields from an SQL database over to the System i." Linoma Software's [2]GoAnywhere fit the bill.

GoAnywhere automates data retrieval, translation, encryption, compression, and distribution for enterprises. With its intuitive interface and comprehensive functionality, the solution helps businesses streamline and secure the exchange of data with customers, trading partners and internal servers.

"Due to our short timeline -- literally, we were looking at just a month -- we didn't want to do any additional programming, so GoAnywhere became the obvious choice," Sy says. "The support person I dealt with was very knowledgeable. Every time we had questions, he was there, and it really helped that he was very familiar with the product."

GoAnywhere can replicate records between database servers, export database records into an Excel document and e-mail it to multiple recipients, and export database records into a CSV file, encrypt it with OpenPGP, and send it to an FTP server. The product can also export database records into an XML document and send it to a secure SFTP server, compress multiple documents into a ZIP file and send it to a secure FTPS server, and retrieve files from an FTP server, decrypt the files, and import their contents into a database.

The Linoma Software product can also retrieve e-mails for a particular account, save any attachments into a file system, and import their contents into a database. In addition, GoAnywhere can retrieve ZIP files from an HTTP server, unzip those files, and place them onto a file system for further processing.

"We've been running GoAnywhere for about a year now, using the database push and the FTP functionality," Sy reports. "In the short term, we'll probably extend it out to other systems beyond our business banking side. With GoAnywhere, it's a secure FTP client, so we'll be moving some of the older systems over to it." Sy also notes, "Most of the other solutions out there do one or two things but not the whole package. That's the reason we went with the GoAnywhere product. It really met all our specific needs, with the database conversion, the database push, and the secure FTP. So far, it has been really solid."

Founded in 1994, Linoma Software provides technologies to meet evolving data transmission, translation, encryption, and compression needs. Linoma has a diverse install base of more than 3,000 customers around the world, including corporations, non-profit organizations, and government entities.