Cover Story
Business Agility
First American consolidates its IT
infrastructure for cost savings and a
unified, scalable network for data, voice
and video.
Jake Seitz, enterprise architect at First
American Corp., needed to refresh and
consolidate the entire IT infrastructure.
Enterprise architecture principles and ITIL
best practices were used to collapse
widespread systems into two redundant data
centers.
With roots dating back to the late 1800s,
First American Corp. in Santa Ana, Calif.,
has seen its share of change, but never
before has technology played such a critical
role in helping the company stay ahead of
its competition. First American depends on
the alignment of its business with
information technology and on the reliable,
rapid delivery of information for its
survival.
The company’s evolution and success are
due partly to frequent acquisitions that
have helped diversify and expand its
business. Incorporating and managing the
widely dispersed and siloed information
systems from this influx of companies,
however, has been no small feat for the
company’s IT staff.
First American is one of America’s
largest providers of business information.
With nearly 200 business units, 2,100
offices around the world and annual revenue
in excess of $8 billion, the enterprise
provides information to some of the world’s
largest mortgage and financial services
companies, and leads many of the industries
in which it operates.
A key business driver for First American
is responding quickly to changing market
conditions. While agility gives the company
an important competitive advantage during
stable market conditions, it becomes
essential during periods of volatility and
uncertainty.
To transform its business into a single
agile entity capable of extending its
leadership position and global footprint,
First American refreshed and consolidated
its entire IT infrastructure. IT strategists
employed enterprise architecture principles
and Information Technology Infrastructure
Library best practices to collapse its
widespread systems into two redundant data
centers linked by a unified, scalable
network for data, voice and video.
This consolidation helped resolve issues
precipitated by the sheer number of business
units and locations within the company.
Other benefits have been cost savings,
process improvement, business continuity and
the ability to quickly add innovative
service offerings.
Jake Seitz, enterprise architect at First
American, knows how the difficulties of
managing so many different business units
and their associated IT systems caused the
company to re-evaluate its overall
enterprise architecture.
"We were starting to see business issues
crop up," he offers. "It was becoming
inefficient to manage the multiple different
systems and environments across the company.
And it wasn’t cost effective."
Before consolidation, the company’s
telephone system comprised a collection of
multiple carriers, service contracts,
equipment and hardware vendors. Not only was
managing these systems becoming increasingly
inefficient and expensive, but it was also
causing frustration for both the business
units and their customers.
Application development and testing also
suffered, according to Seitz. Traditionally,
a developer would request the use of a
data-center server, which the IT staff would
procure and configure. Unless the developer
notified the staff when he was done, the
server would sit unused, wasting cycles and
energy.
A consolidated network
These challenges prompted First American
to undertake the construction of a
companywide consolidated network. The IT
department wanted to leverage the
functionality enabled by the network
throughout the enterprise–such as
virtualization, load balancing, transport
and real-time communications across many
applications. Seitz says that planning the
consolidation also unearthed the need for a
refresh of hardware and IT service
offerings, further justifying the project.
The process of collapsing several
disparate networks and systems into a
consolidated network and data center reached
beyond the IT department. Because business
agility was a primary goal, the enterprise
architecture team needed to understand the
business requirements of the new
architecture.
"It was a joint venture between business
and IT," Seitz explains. The team had a
vision of establishing a utility computing
model in which business units could select
from a catalog of IT services, such as
telephony, storage and server access. The
first step was to cull a set of requirements
from across the many lines of business
within the family of companies.
First, the architecture team met with the
business units to establish requirements and
develop the business justification for the
estimated $100-million project. They
discovered many overlapping requirements
that could be addressed by reusing
functionality embedded in the network across
numerous business applications. The
cornerstone of the architectural plan was
the creation of a single network with two
new state-of-the-art data centers in
Southern California and Texas.
Once the decision was made to move to a
consolidated infrastructure, the team
assessed the technology market by
interviewing industry analysts and
colleagues. Hardware and software vendors
were then invited to review the requirements
and submit proposals.
Seitz notes that First American’s vendors
act as strategic partners. "We took a
holistic approach in terms of vendors. Since
consolidation was about trying to reduce our
footprint, we wanted to do the same thing
with our vendors."
The selection, he points out, was based
on a range of criteria, including previous
relationships with the vendor, the ability
of the vendor to meet First American’s
requirements, and the performance of the
vendor’s products and services. For its
unified network, First American selected a
solution from Cisco and AT&T. Both
vendors were key members of the architecture
team, acting as advisors in the development
of a network that could support the
company’s business requirements and scale
with its global growth.
Detail-oriented approach
As implementation began, each IT
service offering was put through a proof
of concept and pilot program to ensure
that it performed as expected. It was
then validated against the requirements.
"Since it was common for six to 12 months
to elapse from inception to implementation,
once the proof of concept had been
completed, we would circle back to make sure
that the offering was still appropriate and
valid for the business needs of the
company," explains Seitz. "If it was, we
would then roll it out across the company."
First American chose to build its
consolidated network on a platform from
Cisco. Because the IT staff wanted to adopt
a utility-computing model, an important
consideration was that Cisco’s approach
allowed network-based services, such as
real-time communications, security, identity
and mobility, to be used by different
applications and devices throughout the
network.
The network would also allow First
American to implement an end-to-end
virtualized infrastructure. This
service-oriented network platform allows
virtualization to scale as the company
continues its growth and makes resources
such as storage and computing equally
available to any business unit anywhere in
the company. Using a common standardized
infrastructure, the IT staff can rapidly
layer on new applications such as unified
communications and video.
The new network has met expectations,
according to Seitz, reducing complexity,
simplifying the management of First
American’s diverse businesses, and allowing
IT to become more responsive to its internal
customers.
"Every service that we offer now has
operational and service-level agreements
wrapped around it, so the accountability is
there, where in a previous life it was not,"
Seitz says. "The common infrastructure means
that no matter who the customer is, they
have the same points of contact, help-desk
functions and support numbers. Everything is
the same across the board. The end-user
experience is much better."
One of the first and most dramatic
improvements was the rollout of a unified
communications system to more than 60
worldwide locations using upward of 10,000
IP telephony devices. A single Cisco Unified
Communications (UC) system links the
enterprise using real-time communications
services provided by the network. The UC
system, Seitz says, has significantly
reduced telecommunications costs, improved
customer usability and collaboration among
employees, and enabled notable improvements
in efficiency and management. In the event
of a disaster, dynamic call routing allows
First American to send its calls anywhere in
the world at any time for uninterrupted
communications.
Measurable improvements
Virtualization has afforded
measurable improvements in the
company’s business processes through
automated resource provisioning,
Seitz adds. The virtualized
environment has allowed the
build-out of infrastructure based on
average demand rather than peak,
using the data center as a pool of
resources instead of individual
physical servers tied to specific
applications. This
capacity-on-demand model allows
resources to be automatically
provisioned according to changing
business requirements.
"We now have the unique ability to
respond quickly to situations where, for
example, a business unit needs more capacity
because they’re doing a campaign," Seitz
says.
With more than 4,500 physical servers
supporting up to 50,000 concurrent users at
peak times, efficient utilization and rapid
provisioning are especially critical to
First American in application development
and testing. In the past, 30 to 35 days were
needed from the time a developer requested a
server in the data center until it was
available for use. Now, Seitz explains, IT
can quickly and automatically assign
beginning and decommission dates that
encompass a finite period of time. The
ability to provide resources to developers,
or mean time to service, has shrunk to about
15 days.
"The developer can request a particular
amount of time, say eight weeks or three
months," adds Seitz. "After that time
elapses, if the resources aren’t being used,
we just power them down and archive the
environment, freeing up those resources for
the next person. We now have virtualization
in all steps of our application lifecycle,
including traditional development and test
environments, staging and production."
Utilization has improved
dramatically–from 10 percent to 15 percent
utilization to near 60 percent today. The
reduction in physical servers being used has
also had a positive effect on energy
consumption, with 30 percent to 35 percent
less power required by the virtual
environment.
The company has also been able to craft a
disaster-recovery plan through the use of
virtualization and the two mirrored data
centers. Instead of doubling the numbers of
servers for failover and peak-usage
assistance, the team can now set aside 10 to
12 servers for every 100. Should either data
center experience an outage due to a natural
disaster or other catastrophic event,
traffic can instantly be rerouted to the
other data center.
With the heavy moving and lifting of the
consolidation project behind them, First
American’s IT department is turning its
attention to other services it can provide.
The team is exploring an implementation of
Cisco’s Service-Oriented Network
Architecture (SONA) to make further use of
the functionality in the network to enhance
its IT service portfolio. SONA is an
architectural approach for designing
advanced capabilities into the network
infrastructure.
With the new architecture, the common,
standardized network infrastructure provides
a cost-effective platform for IT to quickly
introduce advanced services like video and
mobility. The team is now rolling out
videoconferencing services across the
enterprise.
"Video is a great way to facilitate
collaboration and reduce travel requirements
and costs," says Seitz. Cisco’s TelePresence
System is being used for campus-to-campus
interactions, while individuals will use
desktop videoconferencing.
First American expects to recoup its
investment in the project by the end of the
year, while the IT department has become
more responsive to its internal customers
who, in turn, provide significantly improved
service to their end-user customers.
"Any time you have a downturn in any
market, IT is asked to do more with less,
more so than in a good economy," Seitz
explains. "Our competitive advantage is that
we are becoming so efficient and streamlined
that we can address our customers’
requirements very quickly. And because we’re
so efficient, what we’re paying for services
as a whole has gone down.
"It comes down to being the most
efficient that we can be. If we have a
service that is available today, we should
be able to provide that service to all our
different lines of business and business
units."
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