1979 marked the beginning of a cooperation that is still going strong. The joint idea of the former Oberbank AG and BOI was to develop a flexible, high-performance table access system for the regional bank.
That idea was the starting point for the development of TABEX.
TABEX was developed for table access within mainframe environments. Many requirements of the Oberbank AG were taken into account in the design and implementation of TABEX. Through close collaboration, a tailor-made product was developed for fast table access and for the maintenance of parameter and control data.
The Oberbank AG is now part of the 3 Banken Gruppe. Since1991, the 3 Banken IT has been the Group’s IT service provider.
The close cooperation between 3 Banken IT and BOI has continued steadily over the years, with 3 Banken IT’s requirements being implemented in TABEX successor products. Today, BOI offers with the product family TABEX4 a cross-platform, auditable table-maintenance and table–access system that can be used for all major relational databases.
How well TABEX supports the business processes of 3 Banken IT can be seen in the degree of utilization of TABEX4. For 3 Banken IT’s daily business processes, TABEX is now indispensable: 99 % of all in-housedeveloped programs rely on TABEX access, which is to the complete satisfaction of the bank employees. The access amount is at tens of billions on peak days. The use of TABEX means reduced burdens on and costs for the IT department.
3 Banken IT is the general contractor for all IT services of the 3-Banken-Gruppe
In 1979 the Austrian regional bank Oberbank – Bank of Upper Austria and Salzburg (now part of the 3 Banken Gruppe) approached the newly established BOI GmbH with a request to develop a table-access system.
The result was the creation of TABEX. The basic idea of TABEX was to store variable data (so-called parameter data) and key values, such as interest rates and control data, in read-access tables, rather than encoded in programs. This has significantly reduced program maintenance, since table data stored in this way can be used many times, and can easily be centrally maintained.
A further aim was to transfer responsibility for data maintenance to the operating departments. For this purpose, TABEX had to give assurance that all aspects of safety would be maintained in the online handling of sensitive data.
Through versioning of tables the validity of table versions could be defined. Thus, data in productive operation, such as interest rates, can be activated time-controlled.
3 Banken IT is an IT service provider that operates the data centers of the Austrian 3 Banken Gruppe. It was founded in 1991 as a 100% subsidiary of the 3 Banken Gruppe to utilize the synergies of the three banks and centrally manage their IT. Thus, the data centers were merged, and the application development and maintenance of bank applications were centralized and unified.
One of the challenges of unifying the software associated with the pooling the data centers of the three banks was the replacement of VTAS, a virtual table and file management system that had been in use in one of the banks. For this purpose, a VTAS-TABEX adapter was designed by BOI, so that the VTAS functionalities could be replaced by TABEX without costly changes to the program sources.
High-performance table access
Data maintenance
Job Generator
The audit compliance in the maintenance of tables with TABEX regardless of where they are stored, is a definite advantage for 3 Banken IT. The comprehensive logging and documentation of business processes, the flexibly configurable authorization system, the integration of external authorization systems as well as the release procedure, with its principle of dual control, guarantee TABEX full auditability.
When Robert Fleischer was asked which of the benefits of TABEX he most appreciates for 3 Banken IT, he stated: „TABEX is stable in the heterogeneous 3 Banken IT system landscape. The product has been used successfully for decades. The introduction of TABEX resulted in greater transparency for our company`s processes, which led to a significant reduction in the error rate, and thus to savings in maintenance and monitoring. The instance concept available through TABEX, allows convenient management of many different tables, resulting in significant improvement of administrative processes of cross-client tables. At 3 Banken IT, over 20 environments are in use; four of which are in productive use, the rest are used for development and testing.“
The maintenance of all TABEX4 installations is carried out centrally by 3 Banken IT. Currently, two system administrators manage the entire operation of TABEX over two to three days each per month.
Should we decide in the future for “Java for TABEX”, one thing is clear for us: The implementation would – as in the past – be made in close cooperation with BOI.
