Case Study: Navy Federal Credit Union

Navy Federal Credit Union is the largest credit union in the world. Navy Federal selected HostBridge to replace their existing screen-scraping solutions, resulting in better performance, lower maintenance costs, and streamlined development processes.

Navy Federal Credit Union is the world's largest credit union, offering an extensive array of products geared to meet the specific needs of its members. For more than 70 years, Navy Federal has been tailoring a customized assortment of services to the lifestyle of the men and women of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps and their families. The data for most of these services resides within custom CICS applications on their mainframe.

Navy Federal selected HostBridge to enhance their existing screen scraping solution. The credit union’s requirement is to serve the needs of both members and employees. When serving data to multiple groups of users, Navy Federal felt HostBridge provides more flexibility than screen scraping products.

Challenge
Navy Federal members and employees have different requirements that influence the strategy for integrating CICS application data. Members check account information, submit data for auto-decision loans, and check loan status over a secure Internet connection. Employees need to be able to retrieve data on a member, make changes to account information, and manage all other member service requests.

At the time that Navy Federal began evaluating HostBridge, it already had two existing integration solutions in place. For external users (members), screen-scraping software on a middle tier server performed traditional row/column analysis, allowing users to check status of loan applications; for internal users (employees), a workstation-based rich client performed client-side screen scraping and data aggregation. The Internet solution had slow response time due to screen scraping overhead. Both internal and external screen scrapers had their own proprietary design tools that generated code and their own set of APIs.

Technical Requirements
Previous experience provided a set of requirements Navy Federal’s evaluation team would use to find a CICS integration solution.

• Performance . Navy Federal needed a solution that would result in a quicker response time than traditional screen scraping.
• No screen scraping . Navy Federal needed a more reliable solution than the existing screen scraping system that occasionally failed.
• Single API for internal/external integration . Because Navy Federal used different solutions for internal and external integration, developers were required to use two separate APIs to access the CICS applications. This increased the complexity of building and maintaining integration solutions.
• Support for green screen and non-green screen CICS applications . Any integration solution needed to be able to access what Navy Federal calls a “blast” program. When screen scrapers need to aggregate data from multiple screens, they interact with the CICS application multiple times. This creates network overhead and degrades the user experience because they must wait for all the interactions with the host to complete before they see the results. The blast program is a COMMAREA program that returns the requested data after a single request.

Solution
Navy Federal developed the web-enablement for the CICS applications under a J2EE compliant server in Java running on an open systems platform. They wrote a set of J2EE host access APIs that both internal and external integration developers use to request data from the CICS applications via HTTP. HostBridge does its processing on the mainframe using recommended interfaces and techniques, eliminating the need for session pooling and screen scraping on the middle tier. Previously, Navy Federal’s host access tools accessed their “blast” program through an intermediary system. Because HostBridge can access the blast program directly, it eliminated the need for that system to access CICS data.

Figure 1. Navy Federal architecture

Benefits
HostBridge had a very positive effect on the integration project at Navy Federal. By eliminating reliance on proprietary development tools, Navy Federal streamlined the development process and saved valuable time—without HostBridge, this integration project may have taken two or three times longer to complete. HostBridge allows all of Navy Federal Credit Union’s development teams to access the host applications in the same way.

Performance compared to the existing integration products was remarkably improved. While screens do change, HostBridge has allowed Navy Federal to rely less on row/column coordinates and has shielded developers from the impact the changes previously had on their screen scraping solution. Navy Federal did not develop any metrics to compare response time to the user; however, the credit union stated that response time appeared to be significantly faster.

An added benefit was the decreased level of maintenance with HostBridge. The software installs on the mainframe, which Navy Federal feels is a stable, trusted environment, and there are management tools that allow the organization to monitor everything that happens. HostBridge also eliminated the need to install and maintain separate servers to handle the screen scraping and session pooling. Moreover, because it could manage the execution of the blast program, it provides Navy Federal with the opportunity to eliminate the use of the intermediary system as the "blast-enabler" for desktop applications.