Bancaribe

Story Details

Rapid business growth and expansion into new lines of business have created IT challenges for Venezuela's Bancaribe. In the 1990s, working with Sun Microsystems, the bank was one of the first to move from mainframe systems to a distributed client/server architecture offering greater efficiency, flexibility, and value to customers. Continuing to partner with Sun, Bancaribe in 2005 upgraded its server platforms and consolidated applications to improve operational efficiency while delivering dramatically improved response times and information availability to its internal users and customers.

Demands on IT at Bancaribe had increased exponentially over recent years, to the point where they exceeded the projected needed capacity of their server systems for the whole of 2005 in one quarter. The main challenge was providing prompt, real-time, 24x7 access to information to users and customers across multiple channels. The bank thus launched an initiative to take advantage of the latest technology and improve the performance and availability of the systems supporting its core business-critical applications, including both customer transactions and the financial reporting performed at the end of each quarter in multiple regulatory environments.

The choice of platform vendor for the project proved to be a straightforward one. Bancaribe had a longstanding, trusted relationship with Sun and saw them as the logical partner for taking the next step. Moreover, the existing Sun servers provided a clear upgrade path to more capable and cost-effective Sun systems, including binary applications compatibility between versions of the Solaris Operating System. This minimized the time, cost and potential disruption to business caused by migrating and consolidating applications on the new servers.

Bancaribe moved forward by consolidating applications from older Sun 6500 servers and third-party Intel-based servers onto Sun Fire E6900 servers utilizing UltraSPARC IV+ processors and running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The bank selected this combination of hardware and software based on cost-performance, security and business continuity factors. The new servers offer up to five times greater capacity than the older servers with a similar footprint. Solaris 10 features such as the Security Toolkit and predictive self-healing help maximize security and availability. Solaris 10 also includes Dynamic Tracing (Dtrace), which helps identify performance bottlenecks and speed application performance up to 300%.

By moving applications into this upgraded environment, Bancaribe has increased the speed of monthly batch closing and report generation operations by 40 percent. This has improved operational efficiency while freeing server capacity to provide users and customers with faster response times and greater availability of information around the clock. The bank has now reduced response times to three seconds or less for 90 percent of its transactions, eliminating the queued transactions and longer wait times that previously slowed customer service during peak periods.

The upgrade and consolidation project has also helped Bancaribe re-engineer core systems while integrating and protecting its investments in older technology. Working with Sun, the bank is steadily evolving its infrastructure toward a service oriented architecture offering even greater business agility and customer value. The bank sees the potential in service oriented architecture to develop new applications more quickly, reduce costs, and better align its IT capability with business processes.

Having worked with Sun for nearly a decade to maintain its market and technology leadership, Bancaribe is now positioned for continued business expansion.