Projects With Purpose

To ensure that scalability and performance problems don't return, the company is investing in Unix-based supply-chain software from Retek Inc. A benchmark test last year of Retek's inventory system was convincing. Working under a simulated load of 6,000 users, approximating the scale of Best Buy, it processed inventory requests in less than a second.

Integration issues are a top priority at Middleburg Financial Corp., a six-branch bank in central Virginia with $450 million in assets. Middleburg has integrated its core transaction-processing system with Web-banking and mortgage-processing systems.

Last year, when the bank installed Jack Henry & Associates Inc.'s Silverlake transaction-processing software for financial-services companies, it assumed there would be integration work to be done. "No core provider will give a bank everything it needs," says Lisa Kilgour, VP of operations at Middleburg. "You pick the one that provides the best features, then pick the ancillary solutions."

Middleburg chose Silverlake partially for its ability to link with applications such as Axis Internet Banking, software from application service provider Digital Insight Corp. that enables Middleburg's customers to perform online banking transactions. Digital Insight sends online transactions that Axis collects on to Silverlake for processing.

CCMC Inc.'s HostBridge links the two applications. When a customer performs an online transaction such as an account inquiry through Axis, HostBridge translates the inquiry into a transaction format that Silverlake understands, then translates Silverlake's response for Axis, which displays the results to the customer.

Another integration challenge came earlier this year when Middleburg acquired a 40% stake in Southern Trust Mortgage LLC, a lender that closed $869 million in loans in 2002. Southern Trust had been using MorVision, a loan-origination application from Dynatek Inc. Loan origination is the process by which loan details such as monthly payments and interest rates are generated and printed as legal documents. Middleburg had to find a way to get MorVision's data into Silverlake so it could service the loans. "We didn't want to have to manually input 25 to 75 loans a day," says Todd Braithwaite, Middleburg's IT manager.

A solution was found in Total Enterprise Data Integration software from Decade Systems Corp. It lets MorVision and Silverlake communicate by using a library module to translate MorVision's data format into one understood by Silverlake. It also has enabled Middleburg to fuse its own modest mortgage business (it has 11 mortgage employees versus Southern Trust's 175) with Southern Trust's.

--with Eileen Colkin Cuneo