Finanz Informatik (FI), the newly-shaped information technology (IT) service provider of the Savings Banks Financial Group in Germany, has signed a comprehensive five-year extension of its strategic contract with IBM (NYSE: IBM) focused around streamlining FI into a new enterprise data center to help lower technology costs, reduce energy consumption, and improve overall IT performance.
The contract includes IBM hardware, software and services worth triple-digit million Euros and will help Finanz Informatik to further develop and extend their services to their clients within the German Savings Banks Organization based on FI's core banking solution OSPlus.
Signed in the second quarter of 2008, the deal makes FI one of the world's largest IBM System z mainframe customers.
Finanz Informatik has been recently formed through the merger of Sparkassen Informatik and FinanzIT and provides IT related services to 443 savings banks, ten state banks, ten building associations and additional customers. Once all German Savings Banks are migrated to OSPlus (FI's full-scope, flexible service-oriented banking solution), more than 200,000 bank employees will rely on the services provided by FI. FI expects a multi-million Euro savings potential based on the synergistic effects that a unified IT infrastructure can bring. The contract builds on existing relationships that the previous organizations Sparkassen Informatik and FinanzIT had established with IBM in the past and lays the ground for future development.
"The extended agreement with IBM is an important building block for the future growth of Finanz Informatik," said Franz-Theo Brockhoff, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Finanz Informatik. "Based on the long positive experience we have made with IBM and their infrastructure solutions and services, we feel well prepared for the future."
The continued general technology collaboration with IBM will help enable FI to improve the performance and cost structure of FI's IT platform. FI plans to use IBM's consultancy expertise and proactive service to transform their IT infrastructure into a more energy efficient, consolidated and flexible next generation of data centers. The ongoing further development of FI's core banking solution OSPlus and the framework given for continuous technology refreshes provide the flexibility for further growth in terms of number of clients, transactions and applications.
"Finanz Informatik is one of the most important European market players in providing IT services for financial institutes and needs an infrastructure that can help reduce energy consumption, improve transactions and have security levels in place while thousands of users access its system every second," says Harald Fischer, Director Savings Banks Service Provider, Financial Services Sector, IBM Germany. "The IBM Systems Technology is the cornerstone of the new enterprise today, and we're pleased to continue our long relationship with Finanz Informatik to streamline their data center and give them the technology advantages they need to maximize their offerings in today's competitive environment."