Union Bank of India a leading public sector bank today announced that it had successfully implemented comprehensive infrastructure and technology services with the technical support of IBM India. IBM was mandated to put in place the server and storage system infrastructure with a focus to centralise Union Bank's extensive branch network across India including those in rural areas. The scalable and resilient hardware platform brought Union Bank's 2274 branches and 135 extension counters under a common IT framework while simultaneously enabling a higher number of transactions, thereby reducing costs and allowing Union Bank to respond better and faster to customer demand. As a result the Bank is today one of the few banks in India that has implemented a fully integrated, centralised banking architecture capable of offering banking services anywhere, anytime across all branches. This will be housed in the Bank's new building at Powai. The Bank will leverage on this capability and ultimately bring all its branches under CBS network offering Anytime Anywhere banking. As on date 1211 of the bank's branches and extension counter are under CBS network.

In addition, IBM's Global Technology Solutions will also provide Union Bank with superior disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities - a must-have in the financial services sector. Once in place, the 'on-demand' computing model will allow UBI to scale its computing resources according to business requirements in real time.

Mr. M V Nair, Chairman & Managing Director, Union Bank of India, while announcing this development said, "To meet our growth objectives we needed to move to a centralized environment where economies of scale, consistency and firm-wide synchronization of data will bring significant benefits. Centralising our extensive branch network under a common IT platform is a complex undertaking, requiring significant infrastructure management expertise and experience. I'm happy to state that IBM was best equipped to develop and execute this strategy with a focus on eliminating the risk associated with change, reducing investment cost and providing an appropriate return on investment over the entire lifecycle of the project."

Mr. Kumar Karpe, Country Manager, Financial Services Sector, IBM India said, "For IBM this was a great opportunity to work with one of the leading banks in India. With this partnership, UBI will be able to focus on its core strengths and strategy. With the market growing rapidly, this new IT architecture will enable them to adapt and go to market quickly in a cost effective manner. While customer will be the focal point, the IBM created IT infrastructure will help Union Bank support, extend and strengthen its customer relationship with the bank."

Benefits

The IBM infrastructure provides Union Bank with following value proposition:

• 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.

Sourced From: Vox Public Relations