4-page Case Study - Posted 1/22/2007

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DenizBank

Bank Supports Aggressive Growth Strategy with New Infrastructure

Turkey-based DenizBank has pursued an aggressive policy of expansion, which has doubled the number of transactions the bank manages on a daily basis. To maintain its leading market position, the bank had to cut transaction processing times, manage risks, and comply with ever-changing legislation. To meet these challenges, the bank upgraded its IT infrastructure and deployed a range of Microsoft® solutions. Working with Intel and Microsoft, it deployed a new architecture based on Microsoft .NET Framework using Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET. Complementing this, the bank deployed HP Integrity Superdome Servers, harnessing the power of Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. DenizBank now has an infrastructure that can process its sizable transaction volumes, while offering the flexibility and scalability it needs to expand its service offerings.

Situation

DenizBank, acquired by Zorlu Group in 1997, operates within the Dexia Group, one of the world leaders in public finance. Following an aggressive growth and acquisition strategy, the bank expanded from 13 branches in 1997 to 246 in 2005, doubling the number of financial transactions it handles.In addition to a substantial growth in transaction volume, the bank, like most of its competitors, faces an array of other challenges. These include accelerating transaction processing and complying with an ever-growing body of legislation. At the same time, it must continue to enhance its retail and commercial banking services by increasing customer loyalty and reducing costs. To maintain its competitive advantage, DenizBank must develop innovative customer services quickly, while maintaining low service costs and transaction processing times. The bank’s expanding operations and customer distribution channels—including core banking systems, credit card processing, and Internet banking—call for a cost-effective and flexible infrastructure with exceptional availability. To meet these challenges, DenizBank decided to deploy a more powerful infrastructure that would provide the flexibility and scalability it needed. In particular, the new infrastructure had to:

• Provide high availability for all customer distribution channels.
• Create a data warehouse solution for customer relationship management (CRM).
• Consolidate multiple business applications and databases onto fewer servers.
• Simplify server and application management and reduce costs.

Solution

DenizBank decided to deploy a Microsoft® solution for Intel® processors. Most of the bank’s IT infrastructure is based on Microsoft technology—a result of its desire to ensure a secure and robust environment that integrates seamlessly with clients and other intermediaries. DenizBank complements this suite with Intel® Itanium® 2 processors, which provide the processing power the bank needs to manage the substantial volumes of transactions it processes daily. The organisation has deployed Windows Server® 2003 as the standard server operating system, while Microsoft Windows® XP is used on desktops and laptops. The Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET have been used to develop and customise applications—including a single sign-on system. Microsoft BizTalk®Server 2004, which forms the core integration and process orchestration engine, is used to support the bank’s financial messaging requirements. Using the BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT, it connects internal applications and generates SWIFT format messages for inter-bank payments and securities transaction settlements.

To ensure high availability of its core transaction processing and operations systems, the bank decided to augment its existing HP AlphaServer infrastructure with an important addition: a HP Integrity Superdome Server with Intel Itanium 2 processors running Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems Datacentre Edition and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005. The server platform that lies at the heart of the DenizBank project improves time-to-information while offering scalability, large memory support, and the high system bandwidth needed to run database and CRM applications.

With a proven history of performance in mission-critical, transaction-intensive environments, the Integrity Superdome Server and Intel Itanium 2 processors offer cost-effective processing power for fast-growing applications. With up to 1 terabyte of memory addressability and superior scalability, Superdome platforms furnish an enterprise solution for consolidating back-end databases onto fewer, more scalable servers without sacrificing performance or reliability. In addition, HP builds virtualisation enhancements into Integrity servers, which lets enterprises allocate CPU resources dynamically to different applications and multiple operating systems on the same server—as the business warrants.

Our Itanium 2-based HP Integrity Superdome provides the exceptional 64-bit performance, availability, scalability, manageability, and reliability we need for our data warehouse and SQL Server 2005 consolidation solution. Dilek Duman Head of IT, DenizBank

HP Consulting assessed the bank’s business needs, designed the overall solution, and created CRM data models to help DenizBank achieve its long-term goals for CRM. “Our business applications were on a variety of different platforms,” says Duman. “This made our IT processes more difficult and complex. By consolidating these systems onto the HP Integrity Superdome, we are standardising and simplifying our infrastructure while reducing costs.”

Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 provides the basis for the company’s intranet. Customised portal pages are used by senior management to receive reports generated by the management information system (MIS). The interface can be configured to include productivity and collaboration tools from numerous Microsoft Office applications.

Benefits

A combination of Microsoft solutions and the 64-bit Integrity/Itanium 2 platform has ensured DenizBank has an IT infrastructure capable of meeting its current and future demands.

End-of-Day Securities Processing Time Cut by 71 Per Cent
DenizYatirim Securities, a DFS Group subsidiary, has benefited from the same 64-bit environment that DenizBank deployed for its data warehouse and MIS initiative. Before implementing HP Integrity Superdome servers running on Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems Datacentre Edition and SQL Server 2005, the bank’s infrastructure was unable to keep up with business growth. The 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 platform has reduced the time required for end-of-the-day transactions from 60 minutes to less than 10—a reduction of 71 per cent. Changing from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 has led to a 25 per cent performance advantage.

Partner Approach Accelerates Timeline and Ensures Excellence
The combined knowledge of Intel, Microsoft, and HP has been harnessed to provide DenizBank with a wealth of experience. These organisations have a pedigree in enterprise implementations, and their mutual involvement ensured the DenizBank project ran seamlessly and rapidly. Dilek Duman, Head of IT, DenizBank, said: “With Microsoft, Intel, and HP working on the implementation, we at DenizBank had the support of three of the most experienced and recognised organisations in this arena. Their combined knowledge guaranteed the smooth running of the project and gave us the confidence we needed to embark on such a large implementation. We certainly reduced the necessary resources we would have required had they not been involved.”

Reduction of Number of Employees Processing Applications
The development of the workflow application had an immediate impact on the bank’s credit card business. Now, only a third as many employees are required for processing applications. This has been achieved through the integration of ink-character recognition and optical-character recognition technologies, along with automated checks of customer financial histories and credit scoring. BizTalk Server 2004 is used to integrate the various systems involved in the application process. The workflow solution also contains definitions of all the required processes. As a result, skilled and experienced employees can be redeployed and less-qualified employees with lower salary costs used for processing.

Reliable, Robust Processor Ensures Stability and Minimises Risk
The Intel Itanium 2 processor in Integrity servers has proven extremely reliable in implementation worldwide. The robust nature of this winning combination makes it ideally suited to large implementations such as DenizBank’s because it ensures the ongoing stability of the entire project and offers scalability without compromising reliability.

New User-Friendly Administration Handled by HR Department
Before implementing Windows Server 2003 and its Active Directory® component as a precursor to building the single sign-on system, the IT team at DenizBank had three employees dedicated to managing existing user accounts and provisioning new users with access to the applications and servers they required. The administration of the directory and single sign-on system is now more user-friendly, and the task of adding new employees or making changes to access rights can now be handled by the human resources department.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (nasdaq ‘MSFT’) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place, and on any device.

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/

About Intel

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at: www.intel.com/pressroom.