Insuring more than 40 million people worldwide, AFLAC is the principal subsidiary of AFLAC Incorporated, an international holding company based in Georgia. At year-end 2002, the corporation's total assets were more than $45 billion, with annual revenues of more than $10.3 billion. AFLAC employs over 5,800 people. AFLAC is a leading provider of insurance sold on a voluntary basis at the worksite in the United States and the largest foreign insurer in Japan.

Customer Service and Retention Application Solution Challenge: AFLAC’s multiple business units were experiencing difficulties in effective distribution and management of incoming data. This led to increased complaints from AFLAC customers and AFLAC field force support – both agents and customers would have to resubmit the same data multiple times. There are over 1,000 employees in different departments and locations of the company who process claims, applications and addendums. These same employees support and administer policies to over 40,000 external customer-facing field agents. Incoming data needed to be processed timely and easily and quickly accessed by internal employees, the call center, agents and other area locations. Over 250,000 incoming data inquiries are received each month, each inquiry containing multiple policies, claims, addendums and other business transactions that needed to be accessed by multiple departments. The impact on staff and IT was insurmountable. The following areas of concern were identified as hot beds: Inability to locate data and images despite confirmation by the sender No report structure to capture receipt, routing history and location of data Cryptic search capability across multiple systems Intellinet Solution: Intellinet worked through an analysis of AFLAC’s operations and technical problems to help them understand how to solve these issues and still be in compliance with HIPPA regulations. With support from AFLAC’s architecture and business groups, Intellinet built a web-enabled interface that allowed users to query data based on defined criteria to initiate a search. The search result would be displayed to the user and then allow the user to view the data or generate a email for escalation purposes. The query interface pulls information from both disparate fax and imaging systems so the user can see the results of the search on screen, within seconds. The user is then allowed to “view” the image which initiates as call to a web service extracting the image from the source system and publishing the image to a secure location for viewing. The operational efficiency of the new system supports AFLAC’s growing business and has dramatically improved customer service and customer retention.

The Colonial BancGroup, Inc. is a $15.8 billion bank holding company headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, with 4,000 employees and more than 270 full-service offices in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas. Its common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CNB. Colonial offers a broad line of retail and commercial banking products as well as electronic banking services, credit card and merchant services, cash management services and wealth management services.

		Data Center Migration Challenge: Colonial Bank is a $15.8 billion holding company. They have approximately 350 locations and over 4,000 employees. Colonial had three main data centers to support its distributed operations. Within this structure, they had more than 170 servers, an environment that encompassed multiple technology platforms such as Unix, Mainframe, SAN, Microsoft, internet banking applications and other technologies. With one consolidated data center, Colonial could improve reliability and operational IT to internal and external users. It was also understood that total cost of ownership would decrease if they consolidated the data centers to one central location, thus significantly decreasing costs associated with support, hardware and software. Intellinet Solution: Intellinet worked with Colonial Bank to validated and customize the existing data center design in order to optimally support their needs. Once the design was locked down Intellinet then managed the contractors responsible for the physical build out of the data center including, cabling, fire suppression, HVAC, UPS, generator, and power. Intellinet lead Colonial Bank’s team with the selection and placement of racks, remote access methods (such as IP KVM’s, RIB and terminal server sessions) and voice and data lines. Finally when it came to consolidating existing systems into the new data center Intellinet once again lead the project management initiative to design and validate the plans of internal and external resources moving the various distributed systems into the new data center. Through this process approximately 22 different distributed systems were migrated into the new data center without any unscheduled downtime.
		On-line Internet Banking Application Architecture Review and Optimization Challenge: Colonial Bank’s executive and IT teams had invested significant money and time to bring an out-of-the box on-line commercial application to serve its entire banking client base. Facing multiple challenges finalizing the implementation and testing - three weeks before the publicly announced ‘go-live’ date, Colonial Bank’s CEO backed the IT department desire to bring in expertise that could validate the application’s implemented architecture, provide an analysis on the system’s implementation and testing, and work to optimize the applications performance. Intellinet Solution: Colonial Bank brought Intellinet on-site to work with their IT Team and the commercial software vendor. Within minutes of the engagement, it was clear that tensions were extremely high and in order for anything to be accomplished, political issues needed to be tempered. Intellinet quickly discussed the technical architecture and issues that they were having and worked with Colonial Bank personnel and the commercial software vendor to get everyone clearly focused on the real issues. In two week’s time, Intellinet’s technical skills and (just as importantly in this case) soft skills helped Colonial Bank and the software vendor ‘go-live’ on the planned date. The initiative was a big success with Colonial Bank, and proved Intellinet to be a partner that can be counted on in the most difficult times.
		Lotus Notes to Exchange 2000 Migration Challenge: Colonial Bank’s highly distributed environment of over 270 branch locations required a scalable and highly flexible infrastructure environment. With Colonial Bank’s investment in Microsoft’s technology base and its need for a very interoperable collaborative environment (where applications worked seamlessly and provided maximum features to end users), it became clear that keeping Lotus Notes was not possible. Following the decision to move to Exchange 2000, Colonial Bank brought in Intellinet to work with key personnel to not only help them plan, architect, test and implement the new environment, but to provide for extensive oral and written knowledge transfer. The goal was to empower Colonial Bank’s personnel. Intellinet Solution: Over 3,700 users were migrated to the Exchange platform, starting with the population of the Active Directory from Notes. The users were deployed across multiple mailbox stores and enabled with Outlook Web Access for access to Exchange via a web browser. From the initiative, Colonial Bank has recognized value by leveraging Intellinet’s i.e. (intelligent enterprise) approach. Intellinet provided expertise, knowledge transfer and clear expectations that resulted in a seamless migration to Exchange 2000. Colonial Banks has reduced systems administration and help desk call related to mail system by over 50%. In addition, users have gained access to email, contacts and calendaring without requiring VPN connectivity. Collaboration has also increased due to the implementation of Public Folders for document sharing accessed through the full functionality of Outlook when integrated with Exchange 2000.

Hatfield Philips Inc, with offices in Atlanta, Irvine, New York and London, has been a leading provider of real estate financial services since opening its Atlanta office in 1988. Originally specializing in the resolution of problem real estate assets, the firm now provides a full range of services to investors in loans secured by real estate and direct investments in real property. Hatfield Philips currently acts as servicer or asset manager for a portfolio approaching $20 billion made up of assets located in 11 countries.

Portfolio Management Application Challenge: Hatfield Phillips (HP), a financial services organization that services its loan portfolio worth over $20 billion, was growing and needed to better manage its business using technology. HP is highly decentralized and it services Real Estate Property Portfolios in different parts of the globe. Their portfolio service is unique and does not meet the requirements of an off-the-shelf software application. Loan Servicing Analysts, Financial Analysts and Asset Analysts independently used Microsoft Access, Excel and a commercial IBM DB2 application to track data relevant across the enterprise. Entering and storing data in these multiple sources led to redundant data entry and did not allow for automated enforcement of data validation and industry specific business rules. Scheduled reports and ad hoc reports to clients, the primary aspect of Hatfield Philips business, were highly manual and time consuming processes. In 1999, Intellinet helped HP architect, design and develop a custom SQL based financial services application to support its business. The goal was to achieve greater operational efficiency. In 2002, after Hatfield Phillips’ business had grown dramatically (and changed), Intellinet was reengaged to further extend the application’s functionality to support their international expansion. Intellinet Solution: The new system allows for a single repository of data by replacing the Access/Excel use with a web based data entry system and automated imports of relevant data from the IBM DB2 application. A business rules validation engine was created to enforce CMSA (Commercial Mortgage Securities Association) guidelines for reporting monthly, quarterly and annual financial information of portfolio assets. Success in the United States’ implementation led to an expansion of the application to include use by the European branch of Hatfield Philips. This expansion included localization of the application and currency conversion between multiple currencies. The application allowed HP to scale its operations over 43%. HP VP Ron Bowell shared the following, “The Intellinet Application has transformed our operations and supported our ability to meet our servicing level goals for our clients, without having to staff to the levels required prior to the rollout of the application.”

Main Street Banks, Inc. is a community bank serving Atlanta area individuals and small businesses. We are a publicly-held company, listed on Nasdaq (MSBK) and are currently ranked as the largest and highest performing community bank in metro Atlanta, with $1.4 billion in assets.

Intranet Development and Content Management Challenge: Main Street Bank, the largest community bank in Metro Atlanta with assets over $1.2 Billion and having a public market cap of $420 Million, has grown organically as well as through acquisition. With its rapid growth, Main Street Bank has been challenged with its operational and technology needs. Compounding the problems is Main Street Bank’s highly distributed work environment with multiple offices and multiple business personnel being spread out throughout Georgia. In needing to provide more automated tools and become more highly collaborative (to give the feel that Main Street Bank wasn’t so spread out), Main Street Bank wanted to develop and implement an efficient and user friendly intranet. The goal was two fold; first, establish a flexible and user friendly Intranet to support the overall bank, and second, create individual line of business features and automated tools for many of the eight departments featured on the intranet. Intellinet Solution: Intellinet was engaged to assist Main Street Bank with the architecting and implementation of the new Intranet. The focus was not only providing tools for the bank to better service its users, it was also to empower business users to leverage the intranet through editing, modifying and changing the intranet. The intranet leverages the latest release of Microsoft’s Content Management Server to ensure that Main Street Bank can grow IT services without additional headcount. The tools ease of putting content publishing in the hands of the people that need it, the business users, not IT, has been a big success at Main Street Bank.

One of the oldest investment counsel in the Southeast with over $40 billion in assets under management. Montag & Caldwell is now a division of ABN AMRO and manages private equity with a minimum investment of $40 million and the mutual funds, ABN AMRO/Montag & Caldwell Growth and the ABN AMRO/Montag & Caldwell Balanced.

		Investment Research Application Challenge: After paying for a monthly subscription-based service for investment information, Montag & Caldwell employees still had to massage and manipulate the data they received to get it to a state required by Montag & Caldwell investment personnel (in order to assist clients’ with investment advice). In consulting with Microsoft and Intellinet, Montag & Caldwell realized that not only could a well architected and developed custom application prove the subscription-based service obsolete, Montag & Caldwell’s normal subsequent data massage and manipulation process could be automated with that same application. With the return on investment estimated at a few months, the business case for a custom application was an easy sell for Montag & Caldwell executives. Intellinet Solution: Montag & Caldwell selected Intellinet to build the application to better track financial indicators that were important to the investment analysis process. Intellinet worked closely with client team to capture and document the business requirements for an application to track financial indicators on security data using UML/Use Cases. The application is utilized by the client’s research department to assist in selecting and managing various portfolios. After defining the requirements, Intellinet developed a client-server application utilizing Visual Basis 6, XML and SQL Server 2000. The application included generated data access components created by a custom application designed to automate the creation of both the Visual Basic code and the SQL stored procedures. The application’s success has provided strong benefit to Montag & Caldwell’s operational process.
		Consultant’s Toolkit Client Extranet Challenge: With its highly affluent client-base pushing for more web-based customer service support and service, Montag & Caldwell needed a more effective and flexible secure extranet. A key component to meeting customer demand on the extranet’s front-end would require that Montag & Caldwell have easier support for the extranet (and its applications) on the backend. Also, Montag & Caldwell wanted to focus on leveraging some of the investment it had made in the Microsoft technology platform. Intellinet Solution: Intellinet re-architected an application to leverage the Microsoft Active Directory to manage access to the client extranet. The application dynamically generated and displayed menus based on XSLT transformation of XML menu templates for the client extranet based on Active Directory group memberships. The existing application was developed on the Beta 1 Microsoft platform which was migrated to the Beta 2 release prior to releasing the application to pilot. Responsibilities also included assisting in application migration through the Alpha, Beta and pilot testing environments. All code was developed in C#. All development was based on use case diagrams, object diagrams and test plans based on revised object architecture. Additional technologies utilized included: ADO+, XML, XSLT, ADSI. Intellinet then migrated Beta2 code base for the previously developed client extranet to the final release version of Microsoft .Net. A development environment was constructed consisting of testing, staging and production areas including the integration of Visual Source Safe for both code and web content. Lastly, a best practices guide for versioning and releasing code within the Source Safe environment was published.

Stratus Rewards

Based in Santa Monica, California, Stratus Rewards is part of the Avacus family of companies. Their vision was to develop an exclusive lifestyle management club, offering its members a high-end credit card that enabled them to redeem extraordinary rewards - outside the mainstream rewards programs of ordinary credit card companies. Since Stratus had no real investment in technology, they needed a trusted partner that could embrace their vision, from inception, and own the design and development of a management application of this scale. Intellinet was engaged due to our extensive experience with Microsoft .Net, Biztalk, SQL, Windows and Exchange servers, and because of our ability to seamlessly adapt to fast-changing technology requirements within a unique environment.

Rewards Management Application To achieve Stratus' goal, Intellinet began with an Iteration 0 process - a quick, responsive jumpstart to the development and design requirements phase of the project. Using this process allowed Intellinet to work with Stratus over the course of the project - never being more than one "iteration" away from a working, tested product that was ready for evaluation. A user-friendly custom web application was built on a .Net platform allowing program participants to view their spending points and activity, browse product catalogs to redeem rewards and view their order history. Additionally, program administrators can easily manage profiles on credit card holders and interface with the rewards suppliers. The application has a reporting module for both pre-defined and ad-hoc reports to track daily integration with bank systems and rewards suppliers, updating user profiles, user order history and facilitating order fulfillment. Intellinet worked with strategic integration partners such as Vivre for their product catalog and order management system, US Bank on batch integration and Ticket Solutions for access to near-impossible ticket acquisition to sold out events. Products Used: .Net, Intellinet Integration Engine - Microsoft Biztalk Server 2004, Microsoft Visual C#, Visual Studio, SQL Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Exchange 2003 and PeopleSoft.

"Intellinet's knowledge of the Microsoft .NET platform was a key factor in our selection. Intellinet has proven, without a doubt, that it has the skills and methodologies that deliver solutions on time and within budget. Our strategy was to leverage Intellinet's expertise in technology in the initial design and development while our staff builds on that base for future business value."

SunTrust Banks, Inc., headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia with over 28,000 employees and over 1,100 offices, is one of the nation's largest commercial banking organizations. As of March 31, 2003, SunTrust had total assets of $120.1 billion and total deposits of $78 billion.

The company operates through an extensive distribution network in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, Virginia and the District of Columbia and also serves customers in selected markets nationally.

SunTrust's primary businesses include deposit, credit, trust and investment services. Through various subsidiaries, the company provides credit cards, mortgage banking, insurance, brokerage and capital markets services.

Edge Tracker Sales and Marketing Application Challenge: Edge Tracker, the mission critical sales and marketing application that is used by approximately 10,000 people at SunTrust, was originally developed in early 2001. Following the custom development effort by a few independent consultants, SunTrust quickly learned that the application had several limiting features and functions to support its business needs. Additionally, upon the application’s implementation and in realizing what could be accomplished with such an application, SunTrust’s executives and users started asking for much more out of the application (than they originally requested). In late 2002 the user demands became so great that SunTrust decided that it needed an organization that could rewrite and redevelop the application to take it to the next level. Intellinet Solution: Intellinet was selected by SunTrust to redesign, redevelop, optimize and deploy this core sales and marketing application. For this initiative, Intellinet worked closely with SunTrust’s team to define requirements and formulate a detailed design. Utilizing the new design as a blueprint, Intellinet developed an application utilizing the Microsoft .NET framework and SQL 2000 database technologies. The database development included the construction of a star-schema data mart for new analytics reporting. Using an agile development methodology, development time to rebuild the system, including the addition of new features, was significantly reduced from the time required to implement the original application. Performance results were measured using Mercury testing software to ensure performance metrics were met prior to deploying the application to the user community. The project was a recognizable success providing improved performance as well as additional functionality.

TSYS represents more than 250 million cardholder accounts on three continents, in seven languages and 16 currencies. TSYS has 5,100 employees, a $4.5 Billion market cap and revenue in excess of $1 Billion. Synovus Financial Corp. (NYSE: "SNV") owns an 81-percent stake in TSYS. TSYS serves 18% of top 200 financial institutions that issue MasterCard and Visa credit cards to consumers.

		Customer Service Targeted Marketing Application Challenge: With banking client demand, and to provide for an additional revenue stream, TSYS needed a new marketing solution that allowed its clients to promote offerings to its customer base using a private label intelligent messaging solution. For example, national banks hired TSYS to promote targeted and profiled financial services offers to the bank’s customers. The administration and management of these offers was to be managed by TSYS through an automated and intelligent application, while their client’s customer base would perceive these offers as coming directly from their financial institution or bank. A key element of the application was that it needed to scale to support millions of transactions (or messages) on a monthly basis and that it needed to be highly configurable to support various types of clients. Intellinet Solution: Intellinet developed a service based application utilizing the Microsoft .NET development framework to support the TSYS business need and its clients. The application replaced a rudimentary windows-based application developed with Visual Basic that TSYS had been trying to scale to meet customer demand. The new Intellinet application reduced support by the TSYS IT staff while increased throughput by a factor of five. The results demonstrated a high return on the initial investment while lowering the total cost of ownership of the application. Performance gains were realized primarily through implementation of multithreading logic for the actual processing and sending of the individual emails. Development time was minimized by utilizing .Net as the development platform which also helped reduce the number of defects found during initial testing.
		High-Availability and Disaster Recovery Standards and Implementations Challenge: With TSYS’ next generation line-of-business customer service applications being leveraged internally, and also being deployed at customer sites around the globe, TSYS needed to architect, plan and document high-availability and disaster recovery plans. With that, a key need was to have someone assist TSYS in working with its client-base to insure proper implementation, integration, training and customer service. Intellinet Solution: Intellinet’s trusted advisor role with TSYS was a natural fit to work with their client base for implementing the infrastructure for primary customer service applications at client sites around the globe. Intellinet is also currently developing the Disaster Recovery plan for TSYS’ largest European client, Royal Bank of Scotland.

Southeastern Correspondent Bank
(Name Withheld at Client’s Request)

Correspondent bank with $1.4 billion in corporate assets owned by and dedicated to serving the needs of community financial institutions. The bank works with over 1,000 community financial institutions (and over 10,000 individual customers) in nine southeastern states. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, we have also opened offices in Birmingham, Alabama; Charlotte, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Tampa, Florida; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

		Application Development Roadmap (Strategy & Process) Challenge: This Southeastern bank has over 1,000 banks as customers and in excess of 10,000 users that are served through a variety banking transactions interfacing with the Federal Reserve. Essentially, this bank serves as a ‘wholesale’ lender and financial services transaction hub for over 1,000 community banks. With the unique nature of its business, there are very few ‘off-the-shelf’ applications that this bank can leverage to support its client base. With that, the bank has over 180 applications to serve its clients’ needs. As the applications and needs have grown, the support and manageability has become a major issue for the bank. Many of the applications have been developed as ‘islands’ and they are not integrated with other applications to provide for operational efficiency to continue to scale the bank. Intellinet Solution: To better serve their banking clients and improve internal operations, Intellinet was selected to provide thought-leadership in planning, designing and implementing a new technology road-map. The end goal was a more homogenous, standard, scalable and supportable operational and IT environment. Intellinet assisted in the application development strategy initiative to analyze the current environment of over 180 unique applications, the technology staff’s skill set, and the organization’s future direction based on a cross-section of interviews among executives and high-level managers. Additional analysis was given to previous investments (and technologies in place) to support the current operations and provide for future growth – for instance there was a large mix of Oracle, Microsoft, Delphi, Sybase and other technologies; a key was understanding what made the best sense to ‘stake’ as the foundation moving forward so standards could be put in place. The roadmap initiative success has helped this organization turn the corner in supporting its client base, and the bank is now focused again on growth.
		Portal Strategy, Design and Implementation Challenge: Following the completion of Intellinet’s Application Strategy Roadmap Initiative, the bank understood that replacing all of the backend systems to create a homogenous environment (that it desired) was literally cost prohibitive. As part of the Application Strategy Roadmap Initiative Intellinet had recommended a phased approach to standardizing the backend technology application and database environment (so the organization could manage this operationally and financially). At the same time, Intellinet had shared the success it had had in other environments by ‘marrying’ the backend applications to the end users through a portal. In looking at what a portal could mean to the bank’s internal operations and its external client base, the bank was sold on the fact that it needed to embrace a portal, the question was which portal should they use, and how should they implement the portal. Intellinet Solution: Intellinet first delivered a Portal Strategy Initiative, which entailed mapping out the technology architecture, tool-sets and phased implementation approach based on business requirements gathered through the discovery process. Intellinet then assisted the bank with a planning, design, testing, pilot and phase 1 portal implementation initiatives. In leveraging the appropriate portal for the banks needs, the time to market (the implementation) was fast, and Intellinet was then able to focus on strong value-added customized enhancements to support the bank’s clients. The portal has changed the way the bank operates, as it’s more efficient, and the perception of technology in the environment has gone from poor all the way to outstanding.
		Business Intelligence and CRM Challenge: In recognizing the growth the bank had gone through since 1986, the bank started looking at factors for its success; two factors stood out: strong relationships and unique financial products (services). In understanding that the growth had happened without tremendous analysis of the data that the bank had captured over the years, banking executives realized a major opportunity for operational efficiency, growth and profitability existed. What the bank needed was the ability to aggregate select pieces of data on the back-end from many of its systems and run analytics on that data to understand where opportunities existed. The questions that bank faced was how to properly do this without over-investing, and making sure that the focus was on the business value of the analytics, not the system itself. Intellinet Solution: With Intellinet’s notoriety in the Microsoft community, it was clear that the bank already worked with a partner that could help them receive the most value in a datawarehouse initiative. After finalizing the analysis on how a datawarehouse could be best implemented (with a longterm view) at the bank, and looking at the majority of what the bank wanted to get out of a datawarehouse (from a business and end-user perspective), Intellinet started the initiative focused on delivering a functional phase one system to the end-users inside of three months. The phase one solution that was implemented ‘married’ two important systems’ data: the organization’s financial system with its customer relationship management system. Some of the areas that the datawarehouse will grow to cover for the executives are items like the following: 10 most profitable clients, 10 least profitable clients, top 5 most applicable cross-selling opportunities (by client, and by product), and several other areas to help the bank grow its business by working smarter.