Case Study

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Information Giant First American Builds a Powerful Infrastructure

Industry Focus

Business information and analytics

Size

2008 revenues of $6.2 billion

Networking Solution

Standardized voice and data architecture, with hardware housed and managed in two redundant data centers; IP Telephony solution to simplify remote support

Business Value

High-performance IT infrastructure supports growth strategy and improves productivity. Global cost savings due to standardization and lower maintenance and procurement costs. Centralized security and management.

About Our Customer

The First American Corporation (NYSE: FAF) is a FORTUNE 500® company that traces its history to 1889. With revenues of approximately $6.2 billion in 2008, it is America’s largest provider of business information. First American combines advanced analytics with its vast data resources to supply businesses and consumers with valuable information products to support the major economic events of people’s lives, such as getting a job, renting an apartment, buying a car or house, securing a mortgage and opening or buying a business. The First American Family of Companies, many of which command leading market share positions in their respective industries, operate within five primary business segments, including: Title Insurance and Services, Specialty Insurance, Information and Outsourcing Solutions, Data and Analytic Solutions, and Risk Mitigation and Business Solutions.

Situation

First American's rapid growth through acquisitions created a proliferation of IT facilities, networks and local IT operations. The family of companies operated up to seven networks and 30 data centers, using a variety of hardware and applications. Many offices used standalone telephone PBX or key systems. Local administrators and technicians operated these disparate systems and there was little collaboration across business units. The resulting infrastructure was reliable, but costly, hard to integrate and increasingly difficult to manage. To support its continuing drive to grow, add new businesses and expand outside the U.S., First American needed a new approach to delivering voice and data solutions. The company decided to consolidate and simplify its IT functions, standardize hardware, software and networks and centralize IT management.

Solution

AT&T, working in concert with Cisco, designed an IT plan for First American that closely aligned business units with a centralized IT organization. To address the size and scope of the project, a phased convergence program was implemented in two new, mirrored data centers in Dallas, Texas and Santa Ana, California. A consolidated MPLS-based IP network, supported in part by AT&T, delivers applications and services from the centers to thousands of First American offices. AT&T led the procurement, staging and installation of hardware for the main campuses and spearheaded the IP Telephony deployment. First American now operates on a vastly simpler IT framework with standardized hardware and software on a converged network. This solution has enhanced IT performance, reliability and security, and increased collaboration with customers and between business units. The result is a more uniform and cost effective operation that better supports First American's domestic and global growth as a business information leader.

At First American, ‘Information is our Business'

As the nation's largest data provider, The First American Corporation has expanded far beyond its beginnings as a one-office California title company. Today the company is building its future on the synergies among its title insurance, specialty insurance, information and other operations, using its vast information resources to predict market trends and create solutions that can guide customers' businesses. By combining data with analytic tools, First American can provide customers with long-term solutions that help them run their businesses more productively and reduce risk.

"We have become a family of information companies that now provides services to the largest banking and mortgage companies in the U.S," said Evan Jafa, chief technology officer. "Because data and communications are the center and focus of First American's business, integrated state-of-the-art information technology is vital to our company's future."

As First American entered the 21st century, it became clear that the company's history of acquisitions and its proliferation of large and small offices had created a challenging information and communications environment. The company's data centers and facilities used a variety of hardware and applications. Many offices had standalone telephone PBX or key systems and several different networks were employed to tie everything together. All this required a staff of local administrators and technicians to manage each system. IT management was focused on business unit issues rather than corporate initiatives.

Jafa believed that consolidating the IT infrastructure into two primary data centers — in two distant cities for survivability — would simplify administration and technical support and make it easier to add system capacity as First American grew. Voice and data networks would be consolidated onto a single platform that could deliver services to distant offices, replacing local key and PBX systems. Standardizing servers, data storage systems and telephony equipment would enhance compatibility and save procurement dollars. An integrated corporate directory would improve communications across the business. Consolidation and standardization would make it feasible to manage the IT infrastructure centrally, so security policies could be completely standardized and remote technical staff could be reassigned.

Consolidate, Standardize and Save

"Twenty-four months ago you would have found three large IT organizations," said Rick McGough, Vice President-Telecommunications and IT Procurement. "Those have been consolidated now under Evan's leadership into a single IT organization. There is one technology infrastructure group that facilitates standardization and works on the implementation of best practices that can be scaled for the entire company."

To get the project started, First American issued a request for infrastructure proposals. "We looked at price, features and functions, service and the ability of the companies to support us," said Karen Cunningham, Vice President-Telecommunications. "After evaluating the services and proposals from AT&T and Cisco, we had the most confidence in their ability to deliver." After the competitive dust cleared, AT&T and Cisco sat down with Jafa's team to plan the implementation. Previous experience with the two firms, both already suppliers to First American, increased the company's confidence that it had made the right choice.

"From the very inception of the project account executives from AT&T and Cisco worked very closely together," Cunningham said. "They split out responsibilities between the two companies; AT&T was very much involved in staging hardware at their facility in Memphis, and provided the resources to actually configure all of the hardware in the hands-on installation that took place in Santa Ana." This remote staging and testing kept the project moving while the Santa Ana facility was still under construction.

"AT&T also handled all the project management, both of the LAN network technologies and the Voice over IP technologies in the two campuses, and really did just an outstanding job," McGough added. "AT&T is one of our network carriers and they work with us on some technology initiatives in that area. They have been our principal value-added reseller for Cisco equipment, so we work with them to order the equipment, deploy it and manage the maintenance."

For Voice Communications, a Better Answer

In parallel with the data center consolidation project, First American reviewed both traditional telephony solutions and those using Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to send voice and data over one converged network. "We had a strategy in mind that was enterprise-wide, not just data center or campus oriented," said McGough. Instead of maintaining separate phone switches in each of First American's branch offices, the company decided to have AT&T install Cisco IP telephony servers in the two data centers and deliver call processing, voice mail and call center capabilities over the wide area network (WAN).

"You don't have to invest in any key systems — those functions come off the centralized system," said Matt Beall, Director of Enterprise WAN and Telephony. The Santa Ana and Dallas offices support some 9,000 VoIP telephones and 68 remote offices, and the service will go company-wide to as many as 35,000 phones as existing key systems reach end of life.

Centralizing IT and telephony infrastructure means system availability and network performance are critical. In the past, each business unit had its own wide area network. Now those separate WANs and close to 2,000 circuits have been merged into a single MPLS-enabled network. "Everyone in every business unit has access to all the resources in the data center, without complicating matters and worrying about routing and firewalling," said Beall. Yet that interdependence has its price. "In the past, if you had an outage, you'd only impact one small area or business within First American," said Cunningham. "Now with consolidation we are challenged, because if we do have an outage we are affecting a much larger portion of the company."

To deter such an outage, First American has made system availability a top priority. The dual data centers back each other up in the event of an incident. Infrastructure systems have been chosen for their robustness. The MPLS network, provided in part by AT&T, provides quality of service (QoS) management capabilities to help ensure delay-sensitive voice and video communication performs robustly.

In Jafa's view, First American's fundamental approach enhances availability. "Standardizing and simplifying and not having seven different approaches to the same issue contribute to reliability," he said. "Everything we are doing is focusing on how do we bring more commonly shared utility services to the various business units to simplify, standardize and run the processes more efficiently, have a higher level of reliability and systematically address things like disaster recovery, rather than treat it as an afterthought."

Lower Cost, Higher Performance

The First American IT consolidation is paying off in a variety of ways. "A strategy that allows us to deliver IT services from central locations has a tremendous impact on our ability to cost effectively run IT for the corporation," said McGough. Standardizing systems has boosted First American's leverage and driven down the cost of procuring such items as mainframes, storage, servers and software, while making it easier to integrate newly acquired businesses.

Another area that is impacted is staffing. "We don't need as many technical professionals across the U.S. Consolidating into a single organization is allowing us to bring in best-in-class people and practices," said McGough. For instance, adding contact center specialists who serve the whole company has enabled First American to support all of its business units at a level that no single unit could afford under the old model.

On the operations side, improving collaboration among employees and customers has been a top objective. "Collaboration means enabling the highest possible productivity through data, voice, video and messaging," Jafa said. "The biggest benefit has been our ability to bring our network of employees and customers closer together." The company's business units can work together to integrate products and bundle information and analysis into new offerings faster and easier than ever. Customers have fewer places to go to find the information they need.

For chief technology officer Jafa, the advances have caused First American to see itself in a whole new way. "We rarely compare ourselves to the competition, since we think that no longer is appropriate," he said. "But we are comparing ourselves to our customer base, which is, more and more, the very largest corporations of the U.S. We now compare ourselves to the best in class, best in design and best in approach and process."

Voice of the Customer

"Because data and communications are the center and focus of First American's business, integrated state-of-the-art information technology is vital to our company's future."

– Evan Jafa, Chief Technology Officer, The First American Corporation