Coventry moves its IT into the open

Coventry Building Society, the UK's 12th largest building society, has ditched its 15-year-old Bull mainframe in favour of open systems in an #18.5m bid to position itself ahead of its mutual rivals.

Its new architecture is based on five Sequent SMP Unix servers running the Oracle V7 RDBMS database and Oracle development tools.

Last week, the first component of the system, a mortgage application and processing system, went live. The society has taken five years to design and build the infrastructure. Completion is expected by the end of 1997. Coventry claims it is the first top 20 society lender to move to open systems.

David Hill, general manager of support services at Coventry, which has 50 branches in the UK, said the main aim of the overhaul was to ensure the society could grow by delivering a higher quality of service.

He added that an important part of the project was to control IT and where it was going. 'We wanted to exploit the latest technology without necessarily needing to be at the leading edge,' he said.

Murray Newham, IT services manager at the society, which holds more than #3.5bn in assets, said the Bull system could not process business very quickly. 'The open system will allow us to move very quickly with new products,' he said.