The company
Founded in 1976 in Panama and headquartered in Costa Rica, Banco BICSA (Banco Internacional de Costa Rica) provides financial services through six US and Central American offices located in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Miami, Nicaragua and Panama. With an initial capital of US$2.5 million, Banco BICSA was founded to provide commercial financing services to corporate accounts. Today Banco BICSA boasts capital of US$78.9 million.
At its inception, Banco BICSA selected Panama as its first office due to favorable local legislation, the presence of a strong and active financial center and outstanding opportunities presented by initiatives such as the Central American Common Market. Banco BICSA’s high standing in Panama today is a reflection of their strong professionalism and important position among Panamanian banks with foreign licenses. Banco BICSA in Panama also provides correspondent bank services for Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.
Syniti helps us move our data efficiently and reliably across multiple corporate databases, which allows our business intelligence, analytical and data storage systems to be 100% integrated in an easy, clean and reliable way. We would recommend this product to anyone who wants a fast and easy data integration solution."
Project Background
Banco BICSA in Panama established a large set of data on IBM DB2 on its IBM i. This data is a collection of financial transactions, individual and corporate account information and other business information. However, its reporting and analysis applications reside on its Microsoft SQL Server 2005 system.
Banco BICSA needed to establish an automatic and reliable way to integrate data between its IBM i and Microsoft database, in order to provide rapid, reliable and accurate data to its business intelligence systems. The bank had originally established a manual text retrieval system that was dependent on staff resources, training and availability for efficient data integration. At its peak transaction times, this process turned out to be time-consuming and labor-intensive. The bank was concerned about providing a high level of accuracy and user satisfaction, while keeping control of the costs involved in this manual process.
The implementation of the Syniti trial was fast and the product proved to be very reliable....“Syniti’s friendly graphical interface and ease-of-use were exactly what we needed. We’ve already had a very positive reaction from users and a significant reduction in response time compared to our previous system."
Why Syniti was Selected
Banco BICSA began a search to identify and implement software that could reduce time and effort in their data integration requirements. Key criteria included the ability to provide synchronization between various heterogeneous databases including IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server, an easy-to-understand product for training and usability, and the flexibility to make changes in datasets, tables and applications if necessary.
Pierre Gerbaud, IT Manager for Banco BICSA, investigated various options to solve the bank’s requirements, including evaluating file transfer products. However, file transfer products were not able to resolve data mapping at the field level, provide conflict resolution, nor provide the industrial strength synchronization capabilities out-of-the- box that a data replication product could. Mr. Gerbaud discovered Syniti from HiT Software,® as a possible solution for data management.
Results
After a short evaluation period of 2 months, that included a trial implementation, Banco BICSA was pleased to discover that Syniti provided all the key functionality required by the bank to automate and manage its data integration. “The implementation of the Syniti trial was fast and the product proved to be very reliable,” said Yivan Enrique Alveo Castillo, Senior SQL DBA and Business Intelligence Officer at Banco BICSA.
already had a very positive reaction from users and a significant reduction in response time
compared to our previous system,” remarked Castillo