First American Title Insurance Company has sped processing times and eliminated system slowdowns during peak usage periods by upgrading its title and escrow system to 64-bit technology.

The company’s integrated title and escrow system, called First American Software Technology, or FAST, was originally launched in 2002 on a 32-bit computer. But as the company’s database quickly grew, the CPU utilization passed 80 percent.

“During peak hours we have some 12,000 concurrent users,” said Sue Binks, vice president of application development at First American Title Insurance, a subsidiary of The First American Corp. “Slow downs would reach the point where help desk calls were generated.”

FAST, which is the largest IT project in the First American Title Insurance’s history, integrated the 50 title and escrow systems that the company had accumulated over the years, in part through a history of acquisitions. FAST is Web-based and centrally managed, allowing the company to cut costs, improve reporting efficiency and speed reaction times.

But with a refinancing boom and other business growth quickly beginning to overwhelm the system, the company decided to make the move to 64-bit computing. Specifically, it upgraded to a 64-bit solution with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Data Center Edition and Microsoft Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) running on an HP Integrity Superdome with 32 Intel Itanium 64-bit processors. A SQL Server database with more than 1 terabyte of information supports 12,000 users in 1,300 offices.

According to Binks, screens that used to take 15 seconds to respond now take less than one second. “Performance is no longer an issue,” said Binks, “not even at month’s end when users remained logged on to FAST for hours at a time.”

And Windows Server 2003 and the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2000 provide exponentially more memory space than the previous system.

“Having direct access to 64 times as much memory with Windows Server 2003 means we can cache our complete SQL Server project plan procedures in memory, which decreases the time required for recompilation,” said Priti Desai, director of production systems. “The combination of larger procedure cache and faster recompilation has significantly enhanced performance.”

And while the company had previously seen CPU utilization of more than 80 percent during peak times, “Now even during peak times we see just 35 percent utilization,” Binks said.