Banking

Since the beginning of its operations, the primary focus of IndusInd Bank was on corporates, NRI's (non-resident Indians) and high net worth individuals. The Bank started focusing on the retail market since the year 2001.

With renewed focus on retail banking, IndusInd anticipated that the customer demands for service and response would increase significantly. In order to increase customer acquisition rapidly, the Bank decided to launch innovative retail banking products such as, multi-city banking, mobile banking, doorstep banking, phone banking and Internet banking services. In doing so, IndusInd Bank was aware that they had to be ready for an increase in business transactions.

This required significant changes in their IT Infrastructure. They had to build a resilient and scalable infrastructure to run proven banking solutions that met the demands of the business and the marketplace. IndusInd Bank chose to implement Core Banking based on the Midas Kapiti suite of applications. The Bank planned to go live with the full suite of applications this year and expected significant growth in customers, transactions and workload. They have been running the banking applications on IBM AS400 Model 730. Considering the anticipated growth, the Bank had to upgrade to larger systems and also ensure that these systems are continuously available. They needed reliable systems, which could scale flexibly and ensure maximum availability.

IBM recommended high-end IBM eServer iSeries 870 & 825 Capacity Upgrade on Demand servers and implementation of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solutions using MIMIX to ensure that the Bank has reliable, available and on demand infrastructure to run their core banking applications.

Over and above this, IBM also provided xSeries servers integrated to the iSeries to ensure optimisation of their back office server infrastructure and also make manageability easier. The complete solution included iSeries & xSeries servers, printers, lotus software, MIMIX Software, installation and migration services, implementation of business continuity solutions and on-site support.

The solution provided by IBM ideally met the infrastructure needs of the Bank. The IBM eServer iSeries servers are proven for reliability and security. With the On/Off Capacity Upgrade on demand feature of the iSeries, the customer has the flexibility to increase the capacity of these systems on the fly depending on usage without? affecting the business.

The iSeries servers are integrated with IBM eServer xSeries® servers to optimise the infrastructure for their peripheral applications and simplify the manageability of the overall datacentre. In addition, the deployment of a disaster recovery server as a part of business continuity plan using MIMIX on iSeries ensures that the applications are available to the users even in the case of a system or site failure. This is cutting edge technology deployed to set IndusInd bank apart in the marketplace.

IBM was seen as a strong technology company. The customer was very happy with the existing servers from IBM and found them to be highly available, secure and easy to manage. Customer was convinced that the on demand offering from IBM and the way the offering was delivered on the iSeries servers, clearly differentiated us, compared to other alternate solutions. IndusInd Bank realised that IBM, being an end-to end solution provider, can be the single IT company to deploy and manage all their infrastructure needs.

Says, Mr. Bhaskar Ghose , Managing Director , IndusInd Bank, "IndusInd Bank recognises that good client service involves anticipating customer needs and meeting them satisfactorily, using accurate data and reliable tools. Towards this end, we needed to deploy an IT infrastructure that would provide our staff with real-time access to overall customer information, so as to capitalise on cross-selling and up-selling opportunities - a need that IBM helped us fulfill. The IT infrastructure backbone provided by IBM will not only support our current growth objectives, but also enable us meet growth challenges of the future. Our IT infrastructure is now 'on demand', and this initiative reflects IndusInd Bank's commitment to provide quick and accurate realtime, multi-channel, multi-product services to our customers."

"IBM eServer iSeries is flexible, manageable, scalable, reliable and affordable. Characteristics like capacity upgrade on demand, capacity on/off, etc, let users tap into varying amounts of server power, depending on changes in their demand, thus enabling them to provide truly on-demand service", said Alok Ohrie , VP - Systems & Technology Group , IBM India.