FINEOS Proves Enterprise Scalability

- Platform returns outstanding performance in high volume testing -


Dublin, Ireland, January 23, 2007 - FINEOS Corporation, a global provider of innovative componentized software solutions for the insurance, government social insurance, and banking industries, today announced successful completion of scalability testing of the FINEOS Enterprise Platform. Once again, the platform was rigorously tested and proved its resilience and capability. The test, performed at the IBM Innovation Centre in Hursley, UK, demonstrated that FINEOS delivers a high level of productivity and responsiveness under high-volume and complex scenarios.

The scalability testing was designed to simulate actual “live business” demands and future processing requirements of the largest organizations within the FINEOS client base. The insurance, government and banking organizations that FINEOS serves often have complex business processes and demand a high level of functionality from their technological infrastructure. The FINEOS Enterprise Platform, which is fully thin-client, was tested with a characteristically complex and high-volume production load and delivered performance and scalability well in excess of traditional thick client or “green screen” legacy solutions.

Online testing was done for a variety of realistic user scenarios, including data entry users, call center representatives, read-only (enquiry) access users, and benefit administrators. The use of real-life scenarios, as opposed to repetitive page request testing, provided distinct advantages including: a realistic versus idealised impressions of actual system behaviour, correlation with actual business process usage, and testing and resolution of unintended resource conflicts. Batch testing was also performed to determine the resiliency of the solution under high-volume stress.

“Many institutions already rely on FINEOS solutions to support their high volume business, so we certainly expected these tests to be successful,” says Michael Kelly, CEO, FINEOS Corporation. “These tests confirm our experiences that the FINEOS Enterprise Platform performs exceptionally well under the intense rigors of a live environment.”   

Final testing results included:

  • A demonstration of perfect scalability; 100 percent increase in throughput with each doubling of processors.
  • Ability to scale to support more than 10,000 real, concurrent users using a WebSphere Application Server 6 cluster of IBM mid-range (Power5) servers running AIX 5.3 with sub-second response times.  This equates to more than 20,000 licensed users.
  • Impressive large-scale test results.  At 10,000 users, more than 350 pages were processed per second, which translates to more than 10 million pages served over a standard eight-hour working day.
  • Notable processing ability.  Within a two-hour window, the payments management component was able to batch process more than 100,000 payments.  With a typical monthly payment schedule and a distributed processing schedule, this equates to more than two million payments processed per month and would equate to a customer database size of greater than 20 million policy holders. Increasing the time window or hardware would allow FINEOS to scale beyond these numbers again.

The IBM Innovation Center in Hursley is the ideal testing environment for replicating the high-volume, large-scale server infrastructure that exists in FINEOS’ market base. “FINEOS is pleased that our partnership with IBM allows us access to such state-of-the-art facilities,” says Mr. Kelly.  “FINEOS is committed to developing resilient solutions that exceed performance expectations and our ability to test scalability in a demanding environment is crucial.”