Attorney's Title Guaranty Fund, Inc.
“In large part because of Pervasive.SQL and the other powerful technologies in the Pervasive product family, we have been able to develop products faster, cheaper, and better than we ever have. And Pervasive.SQL has afforded us the flexibility to develop on the platform of our choice. We do business in a completely different way than most of our competitors, and software that rapidly performs and automates the functions other companies do manually gives us an obvious competitive edge. Pervasive’s products have been indispensable for this—and they will continue to be a cornerstone as our information systems continue to evolve.”
—Jim Vasilou,
Manager of Information Services
Attorneys’ Title Guaranty Fund, Inc.
About ATG
Few would argue that buying a house is one of life’s more relaxing experiences. Between searching for a home, sweating out the financing, and managing the excruciating details of moving, it can be quite painful. Add to that the eleventhhour crunch of closing—a process that typically involves obtaining final settlement numbers, rushing to the bank, then getting you and your large check to an unfamiliar closing location—and home buying can be downright hellish. Unless your attorney is one of the 3000 plus members of Champaign, Illinois-based Attorneys’ Title Guaranty Fund, Inc. (ATG). ATG’s free, Web-based Bottom Line service gives you all the closing information you need: the exact amount to bring, the address, and a downloadable map—all online.
Founded in 1964, ATG works to preserve the lawyer’s role in the real estate transaction for the benefit of the clients. Giving lawyer-members the ability to issue title insurance (with ATG as the underwriter) is a way to secure this role. Today, the 150-employee firm issues more than 100,000 policies per year, has six offices, and serves lawyer members in three states—which requires a heavy reliance on technology.
Business Challenge
ATG needed consistent, seamless data management between its two large offices and a data management solution that would supply their Web-based service business with fast, constant, reliable information.
Pervasive.SQL Business Solution
A state-of-the-art network, connecting their Champaign headquarters with their large Chicago office, a variety of powerful in-house applications, and their revolutionary Bottom Line web site are all built on Pervasive Software’s Pervasive.SQL database technology.
Although ATG developers began using Pervasive.SQL in 1998, they have been Pervasive Software customers for much longer. From the late 1980s, when ATG began a serious campaign to beef up its information systems and create the programs that today are a keystone of its business, Jim Vasilou, IS manager at ATG, and his team “bypassed the mainframe entirely and went with newer, faster products,” he says. “Pervasive’s transactional Btrieve database engine was the hands-down choice.” Since then, upgrading to Pervasive.SQL—thereby acquiring a best-of-both-worlds combination of transactional and relational access, along with substantial speed enhancements—has only improved performance.
Because of the flexibility offered by Pervasive.SQL, they have been able to seamlessly move many of their client/server applications to the Web. To implement Bottom Line on the Internet, for example, ATG developers wrote a simple process involving SQL statements, VB Script, and ODBC to provide the same capabilities over the Web that are available via the IVR-based Bottom Line. “Now, people can get on a web page and receive or send information, perform research, and so on. Our databases are seamlessly integrated, with not nearly as much duplication of data as before,” Vasilou says.
Pervasive.SQL’s reliability and scalability are also a big plus for ATG, whose servers contain more than 40GB of business-critical data—800MB for Illinois title policy data alone. Pervasive.SQL’s combination of SQL and ODBC drivers, says Vasilou, “has had a significant impact on our applications.” Needless to say, ATG’s member attorneys—more than half of whom now have Internet access—are very happy about the new capabilities; over 200 attended a recent ATG workshop on ‘A Day in the Life of a High Tech Lawyer.’ “With all our new technologies, the attorneys are realizing they need to get on the high-tech bandwagon,” Vasilou says. “They know there will only be bigger and bigger improvements in the next few years.”
Bottom Line
Pervasive.SQL provided ATG with the flexibility and reliability they needed to power both their client/server applications and their new Web-enabled ones. “The speed, reliability, and sheer flexibility of Pervasive’s data management solutions play a big part in ATG’s success,” says Vasilou. “Because of the software we’ve been able to put in place with the various technologies, we’ve had a huge impact on the Chicago title insurance market.”
For More Information
For more information about Pervasive Software, visit www.pervasive.com, or call 800.287.4383. For more information about Attorney Title Guaranty Fund, visit www.atgf.com
About Pervasive
Pervasive Software is committed to driving simplicity into the complex world of data management, a pledge that’s evidenced by our powerful, yet easy-to-use software products. It’s this dedication that has made Pervasive Software’s years of database business so successful, and the reason developers worldwide continue to depend on our highperformance database engines to power their applications.
