Cameron Cosgrove, First American Title Insurance: HP Selected to Improve Service Levels, Customer Response Times

January 6, 2012

First American Title Insurance Company has upgraded its data center to an HP Converged Infrastructure to improve delivery of title and escrow services while supporting business growth.

First American Title executes up to 7,500 title orders each day while managing more than $10 billion in escrow accounts. To ensure the efficient transfer of real estate, the company deployed its First American Software Technology (FAST), a proprietary title and escrow transaction system, enabling it to manage more than 8 million transactions daily, while serving more than 850 offices globally.

After evaluating server solutions from several vendors, First American selected an HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

HP is the No. 1 worldwide vendor of x86 systems. The HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server, the cornerstone of an HP Converged Infrastructure, has consistently achieved leadership performance results across a variety of workloads, including database, virtualization and applications such as SAP and Java.

“The performance and availability of our title and escrow processing services are critical to ensuring a smooth real estate transfer,” said Cameron Cosgrove, vice president, Infrastructure, First American Title Insurance Company. “With the HP ProLiant DL980 servers, we have consistent uptime as well as the capacity and processing speeds necessary to improve response time and service levels – and ultimately deliver a better customer experience.”

HP ProLiant improves scalability, availability and energy efficiency

HP Converged Infrastructure delivers a unified management framework that allows clients to easily manage mixed environments of HP Integrity and HP ProLiant servers. HP Converged Infrastructure enabled First American to move its existing Windows SQL Server environment from HP Integrity to the new HP DL980 systems smoothly and with minimal disruption.

Accessing the FAST system and its SQL Server database 24/7 requires a scalable infrastructure that connects approximately 225 of the company’s servers while handling more than 16 terabytes (TB) of data. With the HP DL980, First American improved FAST’s transactions by nearly 30 percent, accelerating the process and response times to customer requests for status updates and escrow accounts. In addition, the HP DL980 increased the systems transaction processing capacity by 80 percent, giving the company greater ability to support future technology projects and system developments.

The HP DL980 servers also enabled First American to recognize significant space and power savings, reducing its server footprint by 50 percent and improving energy efficiencies by 70 percent.

These results led First American to use HP DL980 servers for other workload-intensive applications, including its data warehouse solution. The HP DL980 reduced extract, transform and load (ETL) processing time from 8 hours to 2.5 hours and has improved service delivery time by 70 percent.

First American relies on HP Mission Critical Services to maintain peak performance of its infrastructure, enabling the company to focus resources on supporting its ever-changing business environment.