One of the worst-case scenarios for any services provider is failure to meet expected customer service level agreements.

And that’s what one business process outsourcing vendor faced when data extract and load processes began to dip at the same time it was being tasked with meeting an increasing demand for more frequent refreshes of data and near-real-time updates.

The company had been running its data warehouse on a distributed platform and sourcing more than 90% of its data from the mainframe.

It decided to replace that system with System z and DB2 for z/OS as it wanted to deploy new business intelligence applications while solving the hurdles around SLA requirements.

With the new datawarehouse system, the proximity to the originating data allows for high-speed data movement, which has solved the data latency requirements. The outsourcing provider has already moved toward testing Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z for its advanced analytics needs.