Customer Solution Case Study
/ European Bank Modernizes IT Infrastructure, Boosts Agility with Enterprise IT Solution
Overview
Country or Region:Netherlands
Industry:Finance
Customer Profile
Based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, KAS BANK is a leading European specialist in securities and investor services. It has regional offices in London, England, and Wiesbaden, Germany, and employs 720 people.
Business Situation
KAS BANK needed a cost-effective strategy to move away from its mainframe computing platform and deploy a flexible IT infrastructure to build new products and expand its business.
Solution
It acquired the Microsoft Enterprise Client Access License Suite to gain an IT foundation for business agility. Now it can quickly offer solutions built on the Microsoft .NET Framework that run on Windows.
Benefits
- Standardized infrastructure
- Updated technology boosts agility
- Improved IT operations
- Better business intelligence
René Theuns, Manager of Infrastructure, ICT, KAS BANK
KAS BANK is a European specialist in wholesale securities services that run on in-house applications. The bank wanted a more flexible programming environment to develop new applications to run on the mainframe so it could quickly respond to customer needs and a changing market. KAS BANK wanted to shift to the more agile development environment provided by the Microsoft .NET Framework and the more modern, interoperable IT foundation provided by the foundational server products in Microsoft Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) Suite agreement. Today, KAS BANK is bringing new products to market quickly and cost-effectively: In three years, it has rapidly increased the number of products built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and that run on Windows. KAS BANK has already saved €51,000 (U.S.$75,500) in annual licensing costs by retiring disparate third-party products.
Situation
With a history that reaches back to 1806, KAS BANK, headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is an independent, specialized European bank that offers a range of securities and investor services for institutional investors active in the pensions and securities industries. As an independent bank, it maintains direct connections with professional financial institutions across Europe by using a single, central technical platform.
Due to the nature of its business, KAS BANK depends on its information and communications technology to ensure faultless transaction processing and to build new products and services that meet customers’ evolving needs. As a result, the bank has an unusually high number of IT staff: One out of every seven employees is in the IT department.
“We have approximately 100 IT staffers and they are a key part of what makes KAS BANK unique,” says René Theuns, Manager of Infrastructure, ICT at KAS BANK. “We have an important role in the Dutch securities infrastructure, with approximately 80 percent of our projects being IT related. In fact, sometimes we are described as an IT house with a bank license. This is our strength and it allows us to quickly connect our clients to our infrastructure and to supply them with customized services. For example, through connections to our systems, companies can get access to stock markets and financial systems in all kinds of ways depending on their needs.”
However, the bank’s mainframe environment, running the Adabas database product from Software AG and requiring in-house expertise in the Natural programming language, had become an impediment to business agility. In use for more than 20 years, the mainframe had evolved into the foundation of the bank’s operations, housing more than 5 million lines of code. This programming code was becoming harder to maintain as it is not market standard and it was difficult for the bank to find skilled staff going forward. “Our goal was to move to a future-proof platform and offer more flexible applications,” says Theuns. “KAS BANK wanted its IT staff to be working on innovative new products for clients instead of managing the mainframe environment.”
In 2007, to reduce operating costs and drive business agility and responsiveness, KAS BANK began thinking about strategies for migrating away from the Adabas environment to a more modern service-oriented architecture and relational database environment. To ease the transition, the bank wanted to slowly retire its mainframe: It planned to maintain the existing applications, but not build any new products to run in that environment. At the same time, the bank took a critical look at other elements of its heterogeneous IT environment, including the Novell NetWare operating system that it used for file and print services, Novell ZENworks for computer systems management, IBM Lotus Notes for email and collaboration, and VMware ESX for virtualization. KAS Bank also uses the FirePASS secure socket layer virtual private network and BIG-IP solutions from F5, and an antivirus solution from Symantec.
“Some of our existing technologies no longer felt up-to-date, especially in the desktop management and communication and collaboration areas where our employees were using outdated tools,” says Theuns. “Instead of upgrading point solutions, we thought it would be more cost-effective and less difficult to maintain an interoperable suite of standard technologies.”
KAS BANK wanted a single vendor it could partner with as it made the transition away from mainframe computing and laid the foundation for a more modern IT platform to build its business.
Solution
KAS BANK decided that Microsoft would be that vendor because it offers a more agile development environment with the Microsoft .NET Framework. Also Microsoft offers interoperable, industry-standard technologies that KAS BANK could use to form a new IT foundation as it transitioned away from the mainframe. To acquire these foundational technologies cost-effectively, in 2007 KAS BANK entered into its first Microsoft Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) Suite agreement. The Enterprise CAL Suite provides the bank with collaboration, security, communication, and desktop management capabilities. The Enterprise CAL Suite comes with Software Assurance for Volume Licensing, which provides automatic upgrades to new software versions and enables KAS BANK to license the Client Management Suite, which offers interoperable client management solutions.
“The Enterprise CAL Suite agreement was a cost-effective jumpstart to acquiring core Microsoft technologies and slowly migrating applications from the mainframe to rebuild them in the Microsoft .NET Framework,” says Theuns.“If you use a .NET development environment, it is more logical that you run your applications on top of the Microsoft platform. Also, we saw the agreement as a way to simplify our IT environment and reduce the number of third-party solutions we had to pay for and manage.”
In 2007, KAS BANK retired its Novell environment and began deploying the Microsoft products it licensed through the Enterprise CAL Suite agreement. It replaced the Novell environment with the Windows Server 2003 operating system, and in 2008, it built its first customer-facing application since entering the Enterprise CAL agreement. This application, built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, simplifies how the bank connects with its customers using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) financial messaging network. KAS BANK developers used the tools in the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite development environment to build the application to run on Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data management software. They also took advantage of the multinetwork interface of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT. The project went live in 2008 and has helped the bank provide customers with fast, reliable settlements and payment processing services ever since.
The SWIFT integration project was an impressive introduction to a new way of doing business that ratified the bank’s decision to sign the Enterprise CAL agreement. “Technical experts from Microsoft came onsite to help train KAS BANK IT staff on Microsoft products, and this heralded the beginning of a stronger relationship between the two companies—a relationship that KAS BANK feels is key to our ultimate success in moving to a more modern IT infrastructure,” says Theuns.
Strategies for Standardizing
After the SWIFT integration project, the chief information officer formalized the bank’s strategy of standardizing its IT environment to build a foundation for the future with a policy dubbed “Microsoft Unless.” Theuns explains, “This strategy means that, going forward, our primary choice would be Microsoft, and we would only buy a product from another vendor if it wasn’t available [from Microsoft] or if it was a far better fit for our needs than what Microsoft had to offer.”
At the same time, KAS BANK instituted a new project to facilitate its growing commitment to Microsoft technologies. Called Deployment, Monitoring & Control, Configuration, the project focuses on ensuring that IT staff members at the bank are fully trained and ready to take advantage of all the Microsoft products it acquired through the Enterprise CAL Suite agreement.
“This project is infrastructure related and will ensure that our IT staffers are able to deploy, monitor, and make the most of our Microsoft platform,” explains Theuns. “The idea is that we will raise our IT operations to the highest level that Microsoft technologies can take us.”
Building a Platform for the Future
Over the past two years, KAS BANK has made significant progress building a new IT platform for the future. It retired Novell ZENworks in favor of Microsoft System Center products. Under theDeployment, Monitoring & Control, Configuration program, IT staff members are using more and more of the features of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2, which it already owned, to automate software distribution and security updates, and to streamline configuration management for the company’s desktop and servers. The company is also using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to centrally monitor the health of all server systems and .NET applications.
The bank retired its Lotus Notes email service when it deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and used Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server (now Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server) to help ensure the reliability of its messaging environment. KAS BANK deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to support a company intranet for communication and collaboration among employees in the main office and satellite offices in London, England, and Wiesbaden, Germany. The site offers Dutch and English content as well as new workflow applications for bank staff. A companywide site tracks the bank’s project portfolio; each department has its own site, and groups manage individual projects using sub sites. The bank is gradually migrating all its Lotus Notes applications, including document libraries and team sites, into the SharePoint Server environment.
“We built a business intelligence solution for customers using Office SharePoint Server 2007 called IMS Dashboard,” says Theuns. “We are exporting data from the mainframe to a SQL Server database and we use the application to provide our customers with up-to-date reports and information through a SharePoint [Server]–based dashboard.”
KAS BANK is also using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to facilitate real-time communications, such as instant messaging (IM), among staff members. “We are using IM all day, every day,” says Theuns. “It’s one of those products that now we have it, I don’t think we could do without it.”
The Decision to Renew
Thanks to the progress that KAS BANK made with deploying these Microsoft technologies, when it came time to renew the Enterprise CAL Suite agreement in June 2010, the bank didn’t hesitate. “Renewing the Enterprise CAL was a no-brainer,” says Theuns. “We were using most of the products already and had built a roadmap to upgrade to the latest version to continue the progress we had made in establishing a more agile business computing environment. And with the recent economic downturn, in the IT department we are always looking to do more with less. Because the Enterprise CAL Suite comes with built-in assurance of automatic product upgrades, we felt this was the most economical way to move ahead with our plans.”
Today, the bank has a busy schedule of Enterprise CAL Suite product upgrades and new projects. The bank will upgrade to the Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition operating system, which includes the Hyper-V virtualization technology. KAS BANK will investigate a move to the cloud for email services using the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services. It has already upgraded to Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server. IT staff members are conducting a proof of concept with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and will be initiating the upgrade process sometime in 2011. It expects to migrate its customer relationship management solution from CenterOne to the SharePoint Server environment or to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
KAS BANK is also planning to upgrade from Office Communications Server 2007 to Microsoft Lync Server 2010.
Since KAS BANK entered into its first Enterprise CAL Suite agreement, Microsoft made the System Center Client Management Suite available as part of the Enterprise CAL. The Client Management Suite License provides an economical way to purchase Client Management licenses and consists of the following products: System Center Service Manager 2010, System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. With the Client Management Suite, KAS BANK has another suite of products to help drive operational efficiencies under the Deployment, Monitoring & Control, Configuration project. “We are planning to use Microsoft System Center Service Manager to automate and adapt IT service management best practices to improve how we work here at KAS BANK,” says Theuns.
Also on the deployment roadmap, the bank plans to use another Forefront product, Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Protection Service, which is included in the Enterprise CAL. “We can retire our existing solution, FirePass from F5, and use the Forefront product to be our gateway with the Internet, allowing staff to work from home,” says Theuns. “Also, replacing BIG-IP with Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Protection Services would be a possible next step.”
And for 2012, when the bank’s licenses expire for an existing Symantec solution, KAS BANK will investigate implementing Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 to gain proactive malicious software (malware) detection capabilities and help keep its PCs secure. It will also investigate deploying System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 to replace its IBM Tivoli Storage Manager solution when the current license for this product expires.
Benefits
Since signing the Enterprise CAL Suite agreement, KAS BANK has made impressive progress toward building a more agile IT environment for developing new applications and bringing products to market more quickly. With the Enterprise CAL Suite, the bank is saving money by retiring third-party products and eliminating the need for development on the mainframe. And, with interoperable infrastructure management tools and improved business intelligence tools, employees in the IT department and in the office are working more productively.
“When you use Microsoft software, you know that the company will invest in developing that software so that it matures rapidly,” says Theuns. “Therefore, you are assured that by using that software you can develop a solution with the highest standards. This helps us to mature our ICT infrastructure.”
Standardized Infrastructure Saves €51,000 in Licensing Costs
A major benefit of acquiring an interoperable suite of core technologies that address a wide range of business and IT needs is the ability to retire third-party products. KAS BANK has been able to retire Novell NetWare, Novell ZENworks, and IBM Lotus Notes, saving an estimated €51,000 (U.S.$75,500) in annual licenses and maintenance costs. And going forward, as the bank expands its use of the Microsoft products it licensed under the Enterprise CAL Suite agreement, the cost savings will accumulate significantly.
“When we retire Symantec and Tivoli Storage and replace F5 with Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Protection Service, we will save additional money,” says Theuns. “And we are aware of the business case that supports replacing VMware with a Microsoft virtualization solution. After taking into account the expense of migrating our virtualized environment to Hyper-V and bringing it up to the same level as the VMware solution, we could save more than €100,000 (U.S.$148,000) on annual licensing costs.”
Updated Technology Boosts Agility
Today, all new development is done using the Microsoft .NET Framework, so KAS BANK can quickly respond to customer needs and an evolving financial market to stay competitive. “The number of applications we have built on the .NET environment has increased rapidly in three years,” says Theuns. “We are using core Microsoft technologies to gain a more flexible application development platform and to acquire a platform that will take us well into the future.”
For example, building on the success of the IMS Dashboard, KAS BANK has just launched a new application, the Pension Fund Monitor application for the iPad. The application took only five months to build and provides pension scheme managers, trustees, and sponsors with key performance metrics for their scheme’s funding level, combined with compliance, performance, and risk reports. In addition to the key management information, the intuitive interface allows the customer to drill down to more detailed data, such as changes in market value for each asset over time, with a few simple movements.