KBC, an integrated bank-insurance group, headquartered in Belgium, partnered with Ipanema Technologies to ensure full and quick adoption of Microsoft Lync online and Microsoft Office 365.
The objective was to increase employees' productivity and deploy an agile network to give the business the flexibility to introduce quick new business applications. This objective had to be obtained without a negative impact on the network and telecom costs. Ipanema Technologies helped KBC to guarantee business application performance and allow the IT department to dynamically adapt to new usages.
KBC sought to reduce operational costs and provide employees with better integrated services in order to improve productivity. KBC partnered with Ipanema on several key IT initiatives to achieve these goals:
• Deploy Microsoft Lync Online and Microsoft Office 365
• Foster employees' collaboration and mobility
• Improve IT department flexibility – faster troubleshooting and application deployment
• Reduce IT costs by reviewing the global infrastructure, avoiding non-justified bandwidth upgrades and moving to Microsoft Lync and Microsoft Office 365 applications in the cloud
"To support these new usages, we realized that we needed not only to look at the network, but also at the global IT infrastructure design", says Bart Adriaensen, Head of Telecom and UC² eWorkplace, KBC Group. "Our ambition is to have the most efficient and flexible network of the financial sector in Belgium, that maximally supports the business needs."
The Ipanema solution was deployed in 827 bank branches, which will allow KBC to quickly adapt to IT changes. KBC experienced a smooth roll-out of Microsoft Lync and Microsoft Office 365 within six months. Besides that, a new BYOD policy has been developed during the summer, allowing employees to work from every place, every device, increasing mobility and productivity.
"After the full roll-out there will be 15,000 users on Microsoft Lync spread in our bank branches and headquarters, so we couldn't take the risk that they didn't get an optimum quality of experiencf experience. Therefore we chose Ipanema to guarantee the quality of service of our network as well as the performance of our business critical applications such as bank transactions and VoIP", explains Bart Adriaensen.
The smooth adoption of Microsoft Lync was evidenced by P2P sessions reaching 140,000 per week and Microsoft Lync conferences increasing from 92 to 3700 per week. This will allow for Telco cost savings due to 20% less landline extensions on PBX, travel savings of 7 million kilometres and a boost in tele-working with 4,900 people being able to tele-work.
Thanks to Ipanema, KBC avoided costly bandwidth upgrades and stopped using their Telco's Class of Service (CoS), which equated to a substantial cut in network costs. Troubleshooting has become faster and proactive while application deployment is now taking an average of six months rather than the previous average of two years.