Case Study
Industry
Financial Services Product
OpenFrameChallenges
- Reducing risk and improving agility
- Aging legacy mainframe hardware
- High maintenance and procurement costs
- Inability to be flexible or expand core IT architecture to meet changing business requirements
Results
- A smooth mainframe modernization service onto a more reliable, flexible and automated platform with no requirement to redevelop or modify applications
- Total cost of ownership reduced by 1/3
- Improved employee user experience and greater agility
- Superior customer engagement and support—a true partnership between Nomura Securities and TmaxSoft
Company Overview
Established in 1925 as a spin-off from the securities business department of Osaka Nomura Bank, Nomura Securities is now the largest securities firm in Japan and a critical part of the Nomura Group.
Nomura Securities has played a key role in advancing the Japanese securities industry and enriching Japanese society. Since its inception, the Nomura Group’s mission has been to “provide the world’s best products and services,” and Nomura Securities uses it as inspiration for meeting its social responsibilities.
The challenge
Nomura Securities handles public and private sector bonds issued by governments, public organizations, corporations, and other entities in Japan and the rest of the world. Its bond trading computer system, the Bond Contract Processing System, records the content of all transactions undertaken by investors, generates the reports that are sent to investors periodically, and more. Their processing system was originally housed on a mainframe. As the end of the maintenance period for the system’s peripheral devices approached, Nomura Securities began to consider other options.
One option was replacing the system’s peripheral devices while maintaining the core mainframe platform. The other option was moving the system to a more economical open system platform and redeveloping the applications that make up the Bond Contract Processing System. The company preferred the open system option, but it did not want to deal with the expense and trouble of redevelopment. It decided to look for a solution that would allow moving the mainframe without changing the applications.
The solution
As the search began, Nissay Information Technology, a systems integrator renowned in Japan’s finance industry, introduced Nomura Securities to TmaxSoft OpenFrame. After a trial migration demonstrated that the integrity of the migrated applications would be maintained, Nomura Securities chose OpenFrame for its migration project. The implementation and deployment team examined the Bond Contract Processing System in its entirety and selected the applications to be migrated.
OpenFrame tools automatically converted and migrated the target applications. Three months after the start of the project, unit testing was performed followed by integration testing. The Bond Contract Management System began operating successfully on the new open system as scheduled, which was well before the maintenance period expired. Nomura Securities reports that their total cost of ownership has been reduced by 1/3, their employee and user experience has improved, and the ability to respond to changes with agility has increased.