- Needed to reduce risks for GE Capital’s PMS system and improve agility
- Aging legacy mainframe hardware
- High maintenance and procurement costs
- Excessive complexity slowing GE Capital’s ability to innovate
GE Capital is the financial services unit of the global conglomerate General Electric. It provides commercial lending/ leasing and a range of financial services for consumers.
Most of GE Capital’s commercial loans are to small and mid-sized companies, spread across multiple industries and geographies, and secured by tangible assets. GE Capital’s consumer lending activities are also diversified by product and geography and include operations in 55 countries.
GE Capital was looking to move its Portfolio Management System (PMS) suite of applications from ADS/O and COBOL/IDMS running on a mainframe, to COBOL running with Oracle on Unix without changing the user interface in the process. PMS was built by GE Capital in 1987 and began its life as a 20,000-account schedule system without any interfaces.
As with most homegrown systems, it was built out of necessity and to serve the business as it existed at the time. Over the decades, this small system grew in size and complexity to become the central nervous system of both GE Capital’s direct and indirect business units comprised of four highly customized implementations. With over five million account schedules, 382 interfaces, 1,700 concurrent users, and 3.5 million transactions per day running against 71 million lines of code, the PMS system had come a long way from its humble roots.
However, using such a legacy system to support GE Capital’s whole business was incredibly risky; if PMS went down, the business went with it. “PMS is the sun in the universe of the GE Capital leasing business. This is a system that if it goes down, we are out of business at a very expensive cost,” explained Marc Rubel, Executive Director of Application Development at GE Capital.