For the third consecutive year, the Spanish company Orizon has organized on Tabarca Island (Alicante) its meeting “The island of performance”, where clients and journalists together to discuss the best practices in the optimization of the performance of applications and critical systems.
Successful by Ángel Pineda, Orizon has been promoting the “culture of performance” in large organizations, mainly from the banking sector for years. Some of the main banks of our country have already incorporated its BOA platform and have made it an essential tool for detecting inefficiencies, reducing operational costs and improving the response times in systems where service level agreements (SLA) are vital for the business.
The problem they are usually found is that many companies in the banking sector continue to operate with ‘Legacy’ systems, based on Mainframe, whose modernization is an important technical and economic challenge. As Pineda explained during the meeting “we have detected 30% more rotation in the programs (Cobol and Pl/i) than in Batch (JCLS) processes, which implies a higher complexity software, greater costs in the developments and a lower use of zos capabilities.” In fact, Orizon confirms that almost all companies do not take advantage of all Mainframe capacities and this under -use occurs both at the software level and infrastructure. Thus, only 50% allocates more than 25% of consumption to Ziip processors, which have a lower cost and only 20% make intensive use of SORT profit, fundamental to ensure efficiency.
Another key aspect directly related to the performance of large organizations and fundamental when determining the potential savings is the very high concentration of technological consumption in a small number of components.
Thus, and as evidenced by the results of the analysis that Orizon performs, in the Batch field, the 100 most consumers of processing capacity involve between 35% and 40% of total consumption, but only represent between 0.3-0.4% of the processes, that is, very few processes involve much of consumption. The same dynamic can be seen in the online environment where the 40 most consumers are between 75% and 80% of consumption, but only represent between 1% and 1.5% of online transactions.
This high degree of concentration of consumption in very few components implies that the development of software optimization projects will have a great return, provided that the focus is carried out precisely in the processes (components) that are generating inefficiencies and, therefore, extra costs. In fact, Orizon has reduced up to 25% the response times of their clients’ systems and up to 40% the total infrastructure costs, so far generating more than 200 million euros of accumulated savings. And all this joins the shortage of professionals capable of understanding and optimizing these systems.
Nuek’s case
The third edition of the island of the performance was attended by Nuek, the Spanish multinational specialized in payment media, which operates under the Minsait umbrella but with total autonomy. This company specialized in covering the entire value chain of payments, both in the broadcaster aspect (providing technology for the issuance of physical, virtual cards and payments in real time) and in the acquirer (offering solutions for the capture of operations in physical and digital shops).
As explained by Miguel Ángel Prieto, director of solutions and innovation of the company, “Nuek’s business is critical mission and operates in real time, managing more than 4.5 billion transactions and 13,000 APIs consumed per year.” Its Core software, with about 9 million lines of code, has evolved from a project -based model to one of industrial product and, more recently, to the outsourcing of their own infrastructure processing and management.
Currently, Nuek is trying to migrate to native cloud architectures, deploying microservices and containers on hyperscale platforms such as Google Cloud, although it maintains traditional versions based on UNIX/Oracle to adapt to the needs of its customers. This transformation process has been accompanied by exponential growth, multiplying its volume of business in the last five years, promoted in part by strategic acquisitions.
With all these data it is not difficult to understand the reason for the relationship between Orizon and Nuek. And it is that the Boa de Orizon platform allowed NUK to monitor in real time the behavior of its software, using real client data and providing unprecedented visibility both in critical online transactions and in Batch processes. This could detect inefficiencies that resulted in 480 improvement initiatives, of which about 380 were implemented. The results have been overwhelming: 20% improvement in SLAS, 40% reduction in Batch processing times by customer and a total saving of 250 hours of execution.
In this sense Enrique García Escribano, Head of Software Development of Nuek said that “collaboration with Orizon, beyond the profits we have obtained in terms of performance, has meant the implementation of the culture of performance from the first moment of the software development cycle and this excellent performance requirement is already part of our DNA. There is now an obsession with performance from the design, not only in production”.
Growth, partners and the emergency of the CPO
Regarding Orizon’s forecasts for exercise 2025, the company contemplates a 20% growth in its turnover, which would place it at 4.3 million euros. This evolution relies on the development of two business strategies. On the one hand, a new licensing model of Boa, its technological platform, with basic and advanced services, and that allows the company to climb faster and in more territories. On the other hand, the company has launched a business development policy through members.
The Boa de Orizon platform allowed NUK to monitor in real time the behavior of its software, using real customer data
Last April, the company announced a strategic collaboration agreement with the company Minsait, belonging to the Indra Group. The agreement, which plans to extend in the market the use of Orizon’s technology and services to standardize performance and efficiency as an intrinsic part of technology, in addition to Spain, it will also be developed in Italy, Portugal, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Chile.
During the meeting, Orizon has also confirmed the emergence of the figure of the Chief Performance Officer (CPO) in the great organizations. Thus, and according to the company’s data, 40% of organizations are already beginning to integrate professionals in their teams that, under denominations such as “responsible for special projects” or “head of IT projects”, focus their activity, to improve performance and reduce costs. And, according to their forecasts, in a period of three years all companies with budgets above 200 million euros per year in information technology will have a performance responsible due to savings, between 15% and 30%, which allows the application of this discipline in business technology.
Many times cost overruns are explained by multiple factors, from the inefficient use of resources to the lack of an integral vision of performance. Often, technology is oversized to prevent failures, which increases spending without providing direct value. Poor performance also causes delays, low availability, breach of ANS and loss of income.
