Cetelem modernizes its information system with ASG-becubic™

Mapping its application assets for even greater responsiveness

Paris on 25 June 2007

ASG, an enterprise software provider to Global 5 000 companies, announced that Cetelem, the leader in consumer loans in France and Continental Europe and subsidiary of the BNP Paribas group, has chosen its ASG-becubic solution to modernize its information system.

While Cetelem pursues its growth strategy and develops in the international arena, Europe’s leading consumer lending company wants to continue improving its responsiveness, meaning that its loan applications developed in-house and mainly in COBOL must be modernized.

After studying several packages on the market, ASG-becubic emerged as the solution best equipped for the task. A conclusive test on a pilot batch confirmed this initial choice.

“Before we made our final decision, we consulted our neighbor Manpower, who has been using the ASG-becubic solution for several years, and its satisfaction with the product reinforced the good first impression,” explains Alain Davain, member of Cetelem’s MVS technical support team.

Whereas previously, when an application was modified by developers, the impact studies were carried out manually by looking for character strings in the programs with the inherent risk of overlooking certain programs, ASG-becubic now reviews the entire information system without exception. Oversights are a thing of the past. For France, over 38 000 objects are loaded in the ASG-becubic repository, including 14 061 production JCLs and 4 597 COBOL programs, representing 7 614 806 lines of code manipulating 8 649 486 data and variables. The production databases represent 1 terabyte (data compressed at a rate of 3 or 4).

“We have gained in terms of quality and efficiency,” continues Alain Davain. “ASG-becubic analyzes the entire information system. As a result, we have complete feedback on the impact, which is both accurate for developers discovering the parts of programs that need rewriting and global for project managers benefiting from the information system map. It is the right tool for a reliable snapshot of the company’s application assets.”

The target set for 2006 has been reached: thanks to ASG-becubic, the information system has been fully decoded. Around 100 developers and project managers use the tool.

To deploy ASG-becubic, a two-person team worked full time during 2006, plus half a person 2-3 days per month for routine maintenance, administration and monitoring.

In 2007, Cetelem is planning to clean its information system by removing all unused applications, thanks to ASG-becubic.

About Cetelem

Cetelem, a BNP Paribas subsidiary and pioneer in consumer lending since 1953 and lending over the Internet since 1997, is the market leader in France and Continental Europe. With more than 30 million clients and 21 000 employees, Cetelem has offices in 27 countries across four continents.

Cetelem is also the reference partner for trade, banks and insurance companies leveraging its expertise in consumer credit. For further information: www.cetelem.com

About Metadata Management

ASG offers Metadata Management solutions that are recognized as the gold standard for providing a “single point of truth” concerning enterprise IT assets. ASG’s enterprise-wide and application-specific repositories address the challenges of data governance, agile decision-making, business processes, and services development. The Metadata Management portfolio offers the ability to comprehensively gather and manage metadata from all enterprise information assets. ASG’s solutions can also present role-based views to users across the organization and deliver the greatest return on information assets.

About ASG | www.asg.com

Founded in 1986, ASG is a privately held global firm that provides a full range of enterprise software solutions in Metadata, Applications, Operations, Content, Performance, Identity, and Enterprise Management as well as the Business Service Platform, ASG’s Business Service Management (BSM) solution. ASG is headquartered in Naples, Florida, USA, with more than 75 offices serving the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia/Pacific.