European Banking Leader Deploys OpenStack Private Cloud to Speed Product Introduction and Reduce Costs

The bank, one of the 20 largest regional banks in the world, was facing new competition from non-traditional banks with flexible infrastructure and agile development. Despite recent IT systems centralization of all regional subsidiaries onto a single platform, and reliability improvements, the bank’s leaders called for faster application development and innovation. Each application required a unique development and testing environment, making the bank’s infrastructure complex and diverse. The bank’s engineers had to wait days or weeks for new systems to be provisioned, during which time, provisioning visibility remained low. Once deployed, engineers and IT had poor visibility of platform utilization. These inefficiencies drove new server purchases to 500 units per year, constraining other IT investment. The bank needed a new environment to minimize the time and effort it took to build platforms, ideally with self-service and visibility for developers.

The customer is one of the 20 largest regional banks in the world, with over 300,000 employees and 100 million customers. The bank serves more than 20 countries across two continents and operates more than 10,000 branches and 80,000 ATMs. Despite its size, the bank remains responsive and stays ahead of market trends with a strong focus on digital transformation. Extensive online and mobile banking investments have produced over 30 million consumer and corporate users. The bank has outperformed industry rivals, however, it faces new competition from non-traditional banks with flexible infrastructure and agile development.