The new offerings will enhance the adaptability of current technology infrastructures of many tier one and two banks. After more than 30 years of IT development and evolution on all platforms, banks are faced with hugely complex, disparate and unsustainable systems that provide limited ability to reduce operational costs or increase flexibility and revenues - through product innovation or improved customer service. In today's highly competitive environment, banks need to simplify and consolidate multiple line-of-business applications to drive down their cost structure and achieve the many benefits to be gained from delivering a consistent customer experience.

In response, Temenos and IBM have outlined two approaches -- through the launch of the Java version of TCB and T24 for IBM System z - to enable large scale retail banking operations to implement core system modernisation and replacement strategies. The Java version of TCB offers banks a retail core banking solution based on Temenos' proven retail banking system, TCB, the IBM Banking Industry Framework and IBM's System z. It is available as a platform for larger banks who prefer in house development to build upon and create a solution highly customised to their requirements and environment. T24, the world's most popular banking system, is now also available on IBM's System z servers, benefiting from the powerful scalability and reliability of this platform.T24 benefits from market leading levels of investment by Temenos and offers a clear future upgrade path. T24 is SOA Connect certified by IBM. Both offerings have recently undergone technical and performance validation by Temenos and IBM engineers, to confirm their suitability for the largest tier one and two retail banking operations.

TCB enables progressive core system modernisation by implementing an enterprise customer and product management system, built on IBM's Banking Process and Service Models. This provides a complete view of a custcustomer's financial relationship with the bank, including products such as credit cards, insurance, securities, etc. This 360 degree customer view is exposed to all service delivery channels, giving all bank staff access to the same customer information. Comprehensive customer details ensure a consistent level of service and allow bank staff to tailor offerings appropriate to the customer's needs and relationship with the bank.

IBM and Temenos carried out extensive testing of TCB components and validated their successful operation and performance in a Java environment. The testing environment and transaction mix was designed to reflect a real-world large scale retail banking scenario running a representative mix of different transaction types. The database modelled a bank with over four million customer accounts. The tests were carried out at IBM's Hursley lab in the UK - Europe's largest software development lab - and IBM's Poughkeepsie benchmark centre in the USA.

Measured transaction rates for the new Java implementation of TCB exceeded expectations. A steady 5,500 transactions per second (tps) was achieved for the representative mix of transactions on a 32-way z10 LPAR with 64GB of memory. A simpler enquiry workload achieved 11,500 tps.

Koen Van den Brande, Temenos' Group Strategy and Marketing Director comments: "Temenos has already made significant progress in recent years with addressing the needs of larger retail banking operations and has a number of very successful reference implementations in place. In announcing this extension of our relationship with IBM, we recognise that different banks may choose different approaches to addressing the need to modernise legacy core systems. It has been our strategic intent for some time to meet these requirements and with this announcement we are making another major step in that direction. Our long-term vision is to provide our large-scale retail banking customers with the choice to implement a new core banking platform, one enterprise service at a time, business line by business line or by migrating to a new end-to-end solution - whichever approach suits their specific requirements".

Ian Hurst, General Manager Global Financial Services Sector at IBM said: "The powerful reliability, transaction-processing capabilities, and management capabilities as well as the efficiencies of the IBM mainframe have made it the platform of choice for the world's top banks. In today's environment where banks are striving to gain a single, real-time, enterprise-wide view of the client, the transaction and the associated risk, System z continues to provide compelling value and play a vital role. This announcement, resulting from extensive collaboration between IBM and Temenos, helps banks reinforce the economic justification for core bank modernisation. The combination of Temenos software and IBM's System z platform in these two highly-scalable System z solutions will provide a core banking foundation on which banks will be able to compete and grow in today's economy."

Andreas Andreades, CEO, Temenos adds: "This is a very important milestone in our strategy to deliver an advanced, next generation platform to large scale retail and commercial banks that are hindered by aging systems to help modernise their architectures and subsequently lower costs, deliver significant operational improvements and provide a real return on investment. This extended alliance with IBM reflects the new operating model that Temenos has established, which sees the convergence of T24 and TCB to utilise our development factories more efficiently. The combination of IBM System z's unrivalled position as the leading platform of choice for tier one banks globally, with two different approaches based on our TCB and T24 products provides a comprehensive solution offering to banks worldwide. We are delighted to be extending our alliance with IBM to help those challenged by legacy core systems based on advanced frameworks and standards; parameter-based product definition and a services-oriented architecture that is both open and able to integrate to other environments"