INDIANAPOLIS – FORUM Solutions plans to soon introduce a new version of its TAPS Enterprise Lending Application that will integrate with a wide variety of databases and other applications to sharply cut deployment time, the CUSO says. FORUM Solutions is a wholly-owned CUSO of FORUM Credit Union. Its Total Account Processing System (TAPS) application was first offered in 1999 and is now used at 20 credit unions across the country with 11 more signed up for installation. The CUSO just finished the first phase of an integration initiative using the Ensemble solution from InterSystems Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., and plans to offer the new release by the end of the year. “We began work in April and we were able to begin beta testing the Ensemble-based version of TAPS by late July,” says Cameron Minges, chief software architect at FORUM Solutions. “Ensemble has given us the power to provide our customers with improved control over the type of product they receive,” says Minges, who co-founded the CUSO in 2000 along with FORUM CU's CIO, Doug True. The CUSO had faced the challenge of interacting with multiple platforms, hosts and legacy systems with every sale and installation of TAPS, Minges says, forcing FORUM Solutions to make significant site-specific customizations to the lending application. “As a result, every deployment required a major investment of time and resources,” Minges says. Ensemble provides a unified graphical, XML and code-based development environment that accelerates modeling and automates business processes, says InterSystems' managing director of application integration, Trevor Matz. Satisfied with the initial proof-of-concept project, FORUM Solutions now plans to offer the Ensemble-based TAPS Enterprise Lending release by the end of the year, a version Minges estimates can be deployed at customer sites in one-third the time required by the existing version. In addition, “this will potentially save us a significant amount of money every year. We're looking forward to receiving a rapid return on our software investment once we begin the production rollout later this year,” the FORUM Solutions chief software architect says. TAPS Enterprise Lending is a Web-based loan processing system that offers risk-based lending to retain borrowers with lower rates, cross-selling recommendations, and improved loan application turn-around times. InterSystems has been serving IT organizations and independent software vendors for more than two decades, and more than 4 million people are using its mission-critical applications, the company says.. Its flagship products – the CACH post-relational database and the Ensemble integration platform – are designed to enable the rapid creation and fast integration of high-performance applications. -

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