$25 Million Amount invested: $25 Million Organization: Insurance company Original Plans: To implement an image based system to reduce paperwork, speed up the issuing of policies, increase availability (there were frequent line problems between remote locations and headquarters reducing availability to around 98%) and allow for a doubling of business with no staff increase. A response time of one to two seconds was crucial to this latter requirement. The distributed Unix based solutions proposed were all significantly cheaper than the mainframe based ones even though the insurer had a large mainframe-based system. The IT department was in favor of a mainframe based solution as they had many reservations about the likely performance of the Unix solutions and none of the proposed Unix solutions could be demonstrated at anything like the volumes required. However the promised improvement in availability swung the decision to the Unix platform. Unanticipated problems: The initial Unix servers were too small to handle the volumes and the overall capacity was quadrupled before the system went live. Performance is adequate when few users are working simultaneously but as soon as the workload increases the response times increase to anything from 30 seconds to one minute (worse still on occasion). It is this erratic response time situation that causes most problems as the users get frustrated and even resort to hitting any key on the keyboard and even kicking the system on occasions 'to make it work'. Of course this just increases real down time, and overall the availability of the system rarely reaches 90% over a one month period. As a result, there has been an increase in the time required to issue policies and no business increase can be supported without a large increase in staff. Project Status: A review is being conducted into moving the application to the mainframe although there are some political hurdles to this approach. The only alternative is to quadruple the investment in Unix servers to provide more capacity, but this would then be far more expensive than the mainframe solution.