CASE STUDY: VALERO ENERGY CORPORATION

Leading the Evolution ™

VALERO REVAMPS APPLICATIONS TO REDUCE RISK AND INCREASE BUSINESS AGILITY

VALERO REVAMPS APPLICATIONS TO REDUCE RISK AND INCREASE BUSINESS AGILITY

CASE STUDY | VALERO ENERGY CORPORATION

SOLUTION

Micro Focus Enterprise Server™

BENEFITS

50% increased performance

Technology basis in place to move to

a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Reduced system complexity

“As we move proprietary credit card programs to a services-based technology environment, Valero needed a solution that would allow for a phased low-risk approach. One that took advantage of existing COBOL assets.”

Steve DiPaola

Vice President of Administrative Systems and Production Support, Valero Energy Corporation

CHALLENGE

To reduce risk and costs while increasing competitive advantage in the delivery of energy services for both retail and wholesale.

OVERVIEW

Valero Energy Corporation (NYSE: VLO) is one of the top U.S. refining companies, with about 22,000 employees and revenues of $119 billion, Valero has an extensive refining system with a throughput capacity of more than 3.1 million barrels per day. The company’s geographically diverse refining network stretches from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast and West Coast to the Caribbean.

A market leader, Valero has approximately 5,800 retail sites branded as Valero, Diamond Shamrock, Ultramar, Beacon and Total. The company operates on a retail and wholesale basis through a bulk and rack marketing network in 44 U.S. states, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean region.

Valero needed to reduce risk and costs while increasing competitive advantage in the complex delivery of energy services at both the retail and wholesale level.

Faced with a choice of changing hardware platform vendors for its critical credit card transaction processing system, Valero found the perfect solution to keep IT costs in line and deliver optimal functionality to its end users. Without throwing away significant investment in its installed hardware, San Antonio-based Valero found a trusted partner in Micro Focus, who delivered a robust and adaptable deployment platform to continue running its CICS transactions at reduced cost and with minimal risk to their established workload.

THE CHALLENGE

An important part of Valero’s retail business includes the ability to process 400,000 credit card transactions per day, accurately and efficiently. For many years, Valero relied on the IBM System p hardware

platform to support its business. Running its mission critical COBOL/CICS on the AIX platform card processing system was very cost effective and delivering performance transaction throughput to support its business needs. However, the support for their Unikix CICS transaction environment on AIX was discontinued by the vendor, forcing Valero to an important choice. Replace their AIX hardware with a platform supported by their vendor or seek a phased approach to a services based architecture that took advantage of existing assets – now. In addition, Valero needed to extend the application to Web clients.

An important part of Valero’sretail business includes theability to process400,000 credit cardtransactions per day,accurately and efficiently...

Fortunately for Valero, they found Micro Focus, who provided them with an alternative solution that allowed them to keep their preferred AIX hardware running

CASE STUDY | VALERO ENERGY CORPORATION

VALERO REVAMPS APPLICATIONS TO REDUCE RISK AND INCREASE BUSINESS AGILITY

the CICS transaction solution without having to spend millions of dollars on new hardware, or take the chance on a new hardware provider’s support. Key to Valero was their desire to stay with the IBM platform, largely due to the high levels of support and service they had received over the years, owing to the old adage “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.”

THE SOLUTION

Valero chose to switch from their existing CICS emulation software to the Micro Focus Server software solution. This conversion took six months and involved:

Migrating data, programs and supporting infrastructure from the existing CICS software platform to the Micro Focus Server environment while ensuring business continuity.

Benchmarking and load testing on the Micro Focus Server environment to ensure scalability and reliability.

The tight integration of their business systems made a phased cutover impractical and Micro Focus was able to bridge the gap with IBM’s MQ Series for existing Web support while supporting a Java interface to Valero’s credit check service provider.

THE RESULT

The migrated system went live with no major service downtime. More impressive however is the performance, which has doubled on the same hardware. Valero now has intranet access to services for back-office applications and mid-tier integration with Microsoft .NET for front-office applications. This gives Valero the technology basis to move forward to a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). Potential benefits of the SOA environment will be:

Improved ability to modify and extend internal systems giving more efficient internal information distribution, helping Valero staff better respond to customer needs.

Improved customer services and development of new ones from the innovative combination of existing software application resources with new technology capability.

Extending the application to build interfaces to Valero business partners using technology such as XML flows.

The call center application user interfaces were unchanged, thus requiring no additional staff training. The Microsoft .NET-based presentation logic interfaces directly with CICS business logic to provide browser based services for both customers and employees, reducing system complexity. The voice response system now interfaces directly with core business data and work in progress to connect the transaction authorization system to this same data. These efforts close potential discrepancy windows inherent in memo-post and data snapshot approaches previously implemented.

“Micro Focus Server has proven to be a high-performance, scalable and reliable platform for the deployment of COBOL applications, which is more cost effective and has less risk to critical business operations than a ‘replace/re-write’ approach. The re-use of existing applications and infrastructure, facilitated by Micro Focus, allows us to move strategically in support of business requirements.”

Steve DiPaola

Vice President of Administrative Systems and Production Support, Valero Energy Corporation

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About Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk.

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