Australian Finance Group (AFG) Goes Live on Oracle(R) Exadata to Optimize CRM Performance for Brokers

[ Australian Finance Group ] (AFG), the largest mortgage broking group in Australia, has successfully deployed the [ Oracle® Exadata Database Machine ] to underpin its extensive Oracle Applications footprint.
The Oracle Exadata Database Machine underpins AFG's implementation of [ Oracle's Siebel CRM ], [ Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition ], and the [ Oracle E-Business Suite ]. The solution allows the use of [ Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) ] for high availability and [ Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition ] for information management.
Additionally, AFG has selected [ Oracle Real Application Testing ] and [ Oracle Partitioning ] -- both options of Oracle Database 11g -- to further optimize performance of the company's Oracle Applications. Furthermore, AFG is using [ Oracle Resource Manager ] and Instance Caging to ensure any resource contention between the OLTP and OLAP workloads are managed efficiently.
The pre-integrated hardware/software configuration of Oracle Exadata expedited deployment time, enabling AFG to deploy their mission critical CRM system to production within 2 months of delivery. This was additionally assisted by the expert Oracle Exadata and [ Advanced Customer Services ] teams Oracle deployed to ensure the project came in on-time and on-budget.
AFG selected Oracle Exadata as key technology for its strategic infrastructure for the next five years. AFG has already achieved significant performance improvement for its Oracle Applications, delivered high system availability for its brokers and reduced its total cost of ownership. This has also enabled AFG to continue delivering market leading technology solutions to brokers, an important competitive advantage for AFG to recruit and retain brokers, increase revenue and drive the business forward.
AFG currently processes more than 500,000 commission calculations every month. Being able to do this reliably and quickly is critical to broker relations. It used to take 37 hours to process commission payments to brokers, and it now takes less than 9 hours.

Supporting Quotes

"At AFG we pride ourselves on using leading edge technologies to harness competitive advantage, ensuring we can provide our brokers with the best possible service and performance," said Malcolm Watkins, AFG Executive Director. "Over the past 3 years, we have seen a quantum shift by brokers from the CRM mobile client to the web client as data communication services improve across Australia."
"Without the Oracle CRM system, they cannot write their residential mortgages, meaning lost opportunities for both them and us. Exadata offers high system performance and availability to our brokers, so in effect we offer 'On demand' CRM to our brokers."
"We would not have been able to deploy in such a short timeframe without a pre-integrated and optimized hardware and software solution," said Watkins. "Support from ACS and the X team [Exadata specialists] has been invaluable in getting us up and running quickly and providing best practice guidance."
"We are very pleased with the results that AFG is enjoying with their Oracle solution. By selecting hardware and software that is engineered to work together AFG has reduced the complexity of their IT infrastructure and are able to manage more data, improve performance of all applications, and make better business decisions in real time," said [ Robert Gosling, Vice President Technologies Sales, Oracle Australia and New Zealand ].

Supporting Resources

[ About AFG ]
[ About Oracle Exadata Database Machine ]
[ Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition ]
[ Oracle E-Business Suite Applications ]
[ Oracle Real Application Testing ] and [ Oracle Partitioning ]
[ Learn more about Oracle Exadata Customers ]

About AFG
Australian Finance Group (AFG) is one of Australia's leading financial services companies and has more than 2,200 active brokers nationally. Established in 1994 as an aggregator -- that is, a company that provides mortgage brokers with access to products and support -- AFG is now the largest provider of mortgage broking services in the country, accounting for over 10% of all new residential lending nationally.

About Oracle Exadata
The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds. It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking, and software that is massively scalable, secure, and redundant. With Oracle Exadata Database Machine, customers can reduce IT costs through consolidation, manage more data on multiple compression tiers, improve performance of all applications, and make better business decisions in real time.

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: [ ORCL ]) is the world's most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at [ http://www.oracle.com ].

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Australian Finance Group (AFG) Goes Live on Oracle(R) Exadata to Optimize CRM Performance for Brokers