Fannie Mae

Contact:
Fannie Mae
3900 Wisconsin Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20016
U.S.A.
http://www.fanniemae.com

Tools Used:
Tivoli's TME™, CORBA®, MORNETPlus

Problem:
In 1994, the rapidly growing popularity of MORNETPlus presented a major challenge to Fannie Mae. It was becoming increasingly costly and difficult to maintain high levels of network availability because of the growing number of users. Savings and loans, mortgage companies and commercial banks accessed the MORNET network through dial-up or leased-line connections. Because these users had grown to depend on MORNETPlus in their daily work, network outages were unacceptable.

"Initially, and for a short time, we did our management the old-fashioned way," said Chip Gregory, Manager of MORNETPlus Applications. "We had people doing things manually, responding to events manually. We didn't have anything in place to monitor and detect problems in a timely fashion."

Solution:
Fannie Mae, one of the largest sources of home mortgage funds in the United States and a well-established leader in the application of technology, is committed to using advanced technology to simplify and streamline the way mortgages are created and serviced, thus breaking the barriers to home ownership for millions of Americans. The corporation's mission, backed by a federal charter, is to increase the availability and affordability of housing for low, moderate, and middle-income Americans. Fannie Mae uses Tivoli Management Environment (TME) software from Tivoli Systems to manage the server network behind its MORNETPlus loan decision system and for event and fault management of its nationwide corporate network.

To mortgage lenders, the most visible proof of Fannie Mae's technology leadership is its MORNETPlus suite of applications. The applications, including Desktop Originator and Desktop Underwriter&trade, reduce the cost of originating loans to the end consumer by streamlining loan-making decision activities throughout the mortgage cycle. Using the MORNETPlus system, mortgage lenders can offer qualified home-buyers loan decisions within a day, and can complete the entire loan process, including an appraisal, within 72 hours. The MORNETPlus applications suite is available via Fannie Mae's nationwide MORNET network, which runs on a heterogeneous network of approximately 100 Unix and Windows NT servers. Fannie Mae began an intensive evaluation of the available management solutions, with the goal of creating an integrated management toolset - one capable of delivering consistent, proactive management of a rapidly expanding, heterogeneous network. 'We put a few basic requirements down," Gregory explained. "We had a big environment that was changing rapidly, so the management solution would have to be platform-independent. It would have to be scalable. And it would have to be open - that is, CORBA-compliant."

As the core of the MORNETPlus Command Center toolkit, Tivoli provides Fannie Mae with a consistent, highly automated way to manage the server network, across both Unix and Windows NT servers, and the ability to correlate events for root cause analysis. The company uses Tivoli Distributed Monitoring to proactively monitor jobs, processes, servers and networks, Tivoli User Administration to configure and bring on new servers, and Tivoli Software Distribution for distributing frequent updates of the MORNETPlus applications to the servers. Tivoli Enterprise Console correlates events from Tivoli and partner applications and displays the results on a single screen, enabling IT staff to quickly diagnose problems.

By using Tivoli Distributed Monitoring and the Enterprise Console, Fannie Mae has significantly improved service availability. Now IT staff can respond in a more timely fashion, quickly identify problems, and put in place automated responses to alert conditions. By being able to more proactively manage its network, Fannie Mae has reduced by 90% the number of problems encountered at the start of business.