Sallie Mae earns a 2007 Enterprise All-Star Award

for employing emerging complex event processing (CEP) software to provide real-time insight into its multisite Web infrastructure.

By Ann Bednarz, Network World, 11/26/07

Sallie Mae knows instantly when trouble hits its student-loan sites. With complex event processing, finding and fixing online problems only takes seconds for this lender.

Finding out that Web visitors are getting error messages when they try to complete an online loan application is the kind of information a company wants to receive right away, not hours or days after the fact. Timing can mean all the difference when it comes to customer satisfaction. With that in mind, financial-services provider Sallie Mae late last year embarked on a project aimed at letting IT pros and business leaders keep tabs on the level of service customers are experiencing across the Reston, Va.-based company’s Web channel.

With a flexible, real-time platform, IT would be able to spot system events that cause Web bottlenecks, while customer-service groups identify troubled processes, fraud teams capture suspicious transactions or account activity, and marketing executives hone their campaigns.

The project went live in the first quarter. For the project, Sallie Mae selected three products: Coral8’s Engine 5.0 event-processing technology; Tealeaf Technology’s CX 6.0 Web application-monitoring software; and Advanced Software Engineering’s ChartDirector chart-generating software. …

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Note: Sallie Mae was founded in 1972 as a government-sponsored entity but dissolved its ties to the federal government in 2004. Today SLM Corp., its formal name, has about 12,000 employees (1,500 of whom work in IT), manages $160 billion in education loans and reported $8.8 billion revenue in 2006.