Banking

YES BANK Ltd. is the newest entrant in the Indian Banking sector. It started operations in November 2004 and has already created a presence in the Industry by virtue of its innovative Business Model. YES BANK aims to be a state-of-the-art technology driven, high quality, private Indian Bank catering to "EMERGING INDIA".

With no legacy systems to inherit, YES Bank was looking at associating with a complete IT partner who would:

• Enable the bank to take complete advantage of industry leadership with respect to the technology product portfolio offerings.
• Ensure service with minimum interruption for round-the-clock business operations.
• Provide a high performance and scalable platform.
• Optimise the systems with better manageability.
• Future proof against IT investments.

To address the challenges above, IBM proposed servers based on POWER5 technology. As there were disparate applications and security concerns, different server environments with storage consolidation was the ideal solution. All the servers would connect to the SAN Switches, which in turn would be connected to the IBM Storage for Production environment. The solution had been configured with redundant paths with no single point of failure in the connectivity to the storage and the network.

The business applications powered by IBM eServers were:

• Core Banking - Retail & Corporate by iFlex: This runs on a cluster of p550 as the database servers and x365 as the application servers.
• Cash Management application by Cashtech: Cluster of 520 servers
• Treasury application by Murex: Cluster of 520 servers

Realising that messaging protocols like XML will be a de-facto standard in the near future, YES BANK also deployed IBM's Websphere MQ - to keep the bank's database real-time and reap benefits while integrating different applications like Net Banking, RTGS, NDS and CBLO. This is a crucial element in YES BANK's IT Infrastructure - as the bank aims to be at the forefront of settlement mechanism with an objective of bringing the power of online settlement to the customer's desktop.

YES BANK wanted to be geared up to meet its future expansion plans. The scalability of the IBM system and its virtualisation capability fitted the client requirements perfectly unlike competitive solutions.

The IBM infrastructure on Power5 provided the customer with following benefits:

• Mainframe-inspired features that help businesses thrive by providing higher utilisation.
• Massive performance enhancements.
• Greater flexibility and lower IT management costs.
• Consistent, real-time data and information on demand.
• Robust, high-availability IT infrastructure with minimum disruption to business.

IBM was seen as a strong technology company, with definite technology roadmap and commitment. The ability to cater effectively to complete IT needs of the client proved to be the key differentiator against competitors.