“With our legacy in finance we are keenly aware of the pressure companies are under to achieve a fast close and create sustainable compliance processes,” says Crispin Read, chief marketing officer at Cartesis. “The benchmark results show how a powerful business performance management framework can support a high number of users with the speed and accuracy financial executives demand. At the end of the day this level of performance translates hours into minutes and has a tangible impact on close times.”

Fast Technology for a Fast Close

The tests, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and HP Integrity hardware, demonstrate Cartesis Finance's ability to:

• Support 1,500 active concurrent users while performing financial consolidation
• Support 12 simultaneous consolidations running with up to 500 active users in one application
• Achieve average response times, on 100 user actions, of under three seconds
• Scale the applications with new users while maintaining performance

The results also demonstrate the importance of a company scrutinizing its IT infrastructure to identify processes and technologies that impede a fast close as well as the value of implementing high-performance applications and strategies to achieve one. The expanding scope and increasingly large deployments of financial applications means what was once hundreds of users is now in the area of thousands. This makes it increasingly important for an IT infrastructure to support mission-critical applications with high availability, high scalability and high reliability to provide users with the flawless performance they demand.

The testing was conducted by Cartesis in a Microsoft Technology Center on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and HP server hardware and leveraged Compuware's QALoad solution to simulate, through real-life usage scenarios and user profiles, the equivalent of six months of actual reporting cycles involving more than 14,000 data submissions and 160,000 input schedules.

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