Canara Bank, one of the largest public sector banks in India, recently went live with its Core Banking solution across 3,057 locations. IBM, leveraging its strength across consulting, technology services, and infrastructure management, implemented the Core Banking solution and will also provide end-to-end support to the bank over the next 7 years.

Canara Bank had engaged IBM in August 2005 to implement the comprehensive Centralized Banking solution constituting of a suite of 14 satellite applications centered around the Core Banking solution. As part of the engagement, IBM was responsible for designing, building, deployment, and support of the centralized Core Banking solution as well as that for the satellite applications. IBM also helped the bank setting up and managing the data center and disaster recovery infrastructure, establishing the Local Area Network in over 1,000 branches, monitoring the Wide Area Network of the bank, and managing business continuity services to be able to seamlessly switch from the data center to disaster recovery mode.

When it comes to technology adoption, Canara Bank has been the front runner in adopting technology among the public sector banks in India. We are pleased to have a dedicated team of IBM experts at Canara Bank, who helped us make informed decisions about the future of our IT environment. Customer-led product and services development, adaptation and innovation are the guiding principles for us. Keeping this in mind, we chose IBM to deliver a complete Core Banking Solution on account of their dedication to the success of the clients and their ability to support the Banks business growth. The value proposition of IBMs overall solution was unmatched, said the Canara Bank spokesperson.

Canara Banks Core Banking Solution touches 45 million customers across India. The entire solution has been implemented and integrated by the IBM Global Business Services team leveraging their Banking industry and complex systems integration experiences. The solution is powered by the latest IBM POWER7, System x and Storage Technology and managed by a team of experts from IBM Global Business Services and Global Technology Services using Tivoli suite of products. This infrastructure today enables 4 million business transactions every day supporting over 2,000 ATMs and 25,000 concurrent users on the system.

With this, IBM has completed the implementation of one of the worlds largest integration project around Core Banking solution, a testimony of IBMs ability to integrate and deliver complex industry solutions. The Phase Two rollout is one of the fastest roll-outs in India with over 200 branches going live every week. The project also involved one of the fastest data center migration activity in the industry, deploying some of the latest hardware and software from IBM.

Canara Bank India recognized the need to build a robust, dynamic solution to address their current and future expansion plans. Canara Bank is a perfect example of IBMs commitment to help organizations build streamlined, dynamic application and infrastructures that allow them to become more resilient, better positioned for growth and participate in building a smarter planet, said Sriram Rajan, Vice President, General Business: South, IBM India/SouthAsia