First American Title Insurance Company manages more than 25 percent of the title insurance business in the U.S. and helps millions of people every year fulfull the dream of home ownership.

Challenge
• Impose order. With extensive growth through acquisitions, First American had over 50 title and escrow systems running on a wide range of platforms. Business processes were inconsistent across the company, and critical management data had to be compiled manually, causing a 3-4 week delay in getting timely information. The unwieldy infrastructure drove operations costs up and made it difficult to deploy new services quickly.
• Standardize and consolidate. First American developed FAST and standardized it on Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers, to provide a consistent business platform. As business grew, the company scaled to 32-way configurations. The consolidation helped First American generate $50 million in annual savings, but with 15,000 daily users and a red-hot real estate market, the company needed even more power.

Solutions
• Take performance to the next level. First American migrated FAST to the 64-bit architecture of the Intel Itanium 2 processor. The 32-way HP Integrity Superdome* server immediately boosted performance by 20 percent and cut CPU utilization in half, helping the company enhance customer satisfaction and keep pace with the dynamic real estate market.
• Get smart. Building on its unified transaction system, First American created a robust data warehouse that runs on a 16-way Itanium 2-based server and gives managers next-day information for faster, more informed decisions.


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