The IBM Worldwide Banking Center of Excellence helps financial institutions re-engineer and transform their older back-office processing systems with lower risk, faster speed, and manageable project costs.

Today's financial institutions face pressure from all sides. As they wrestle the competition for razor-thin margins on increasingly commoditized financial products—all while striving to control operational costs—they are also required to comply with a formidable number of regulatory mandates.

Savvy financial institutions are learning that to compete and win in such a business environment, they must embrace new operating models and take advantage of the most recent developments in IT. Many are transforming their existing business and IT infrastructures in an effort to create flexible, easily provisioned architectures that integrate data and business processes from across the enterprise—as well as from key partners and clients.

Unfortunately, the past 40 years of IT evolution—not to mention mergers and acquisitions—have left most financial services companies with enterprise computing infrastructures that are fragmented, widely distributed and increasingly complex. In their efforts to develop—and in some cases simply maintain—older core banking solutions, many financial institutions are facing high costs, glacial time to market for new products and services and questionable success. For many banks, achieving a single, unified, cross-channel view of customers is a practically insurmountable challenge that can lead to poor service levels, missed revenue opportunities and frustrated customers. Even worse, at some institutions, old, poorly integrated systems with weak documentation and control can place the security of transactions and databases at risk.

To help banking clients overcome these challenges and transform their older back-office to solutions designed for lower risk, faster speed, and manageable project costs, IBM has established the IBM Banking Center of Excellence.

Staffed by technical and banking experts with deep knowledge of core banking and payment business processes and systems—as well as the relevant hardware and software technologies that support them—the IBM Center of Excellence team will work closely with banks seeking technical advice and assistance with transformation projects. The goal? To help financial institutions leverage the breadth and depth of IBM and its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners' technology to define and construct an end-point solution and IT architecture designed to be efficient, secure, flexible and better able to respond to changing business conditions.

At present, the IBM Center of Excellence provides services and support across two locations—the IBM Poughkeepsie (POK) Design Center in New York, and the IBM Silicon Valley Lab (SVL) High Performance On Demand Solutions (HiPODS) center in California—and features IBM® System z™ mainframe server technology at its core. In addition, the Center of Excellence community of experts will leverage other IBM centers and serve clients globally.

For banking clients, the IBM Center of Excellence is designed to help provide the industry knowledge and technical expertise not only to greatly speed time to project completion, but even more importantly, to assist in reducing the risks typically associated with core systems and back-office transitions.

By collecting and perfecting best practices observed across many years and multiple engagements, the IBM Center of Excellence team can help clients reach a successful outcome for their projects. To further reduce risk and enhance the odds of successful completion, the Center of Excellence will support a "progressive renovation" approach in which upgrades are performed in a phased modular manner—rather than as a "big bang" cutover approach that can result in massive projects with a higher risk of failure. By helping clients develop the right architecture and select components to progressively move to new technology, the Center of Excellence offers an approach that is designed to help reduce this risk, offer earlier business benefits and save implementation costs. In addition, clients can work with the Center of Excellence team to prototype and benchmark key components that can help accelerate their transformation.

This value proposition will extend through the full lifecycle of back-office transformation projects, ranging from business case development through vendor/package selection, benchmarking, deployment, quality assurance and assistance in migrating from legacy back-office systems to new environments.

To help IBM banking clients achieve success across a wide variety of IT transformation scenarios, available Center of Excellence engagements will include initial technical design, application prototyping and benchmarking activities for a number of use cases designed to provide unique value propositions, such as:

High Performance Taking advantage of the expertise of the IBM Software Group High Performance On Demand Solutions team, as well as the IBM Systems and Technology Group performance team and system assets, the Center of Excellence will help banks design solutions that emphasize speed and throughput.

High Availability For banks with mission-critical workloads—such as foreign exchange and payment settlement systems—and others that place a premium on continuous operation of their back offices, the Center of Excellence will demonstrate high availability solutions, such as IBM System z and autonomic computing capabilities, to help ensure that back-office systems maintain operations designed to be efficient and low-cost.

Global Banking For international banks seeking to synchronize the operations of their foreign branches with domestic headquarters and gain the ability to close their books on a "follow the sun" basis, the Center of Excellence will provide IBM experts in concurrent database operations and global networking to help optimize "global hubbing" environments.

Security, Disaster Recovery and Encryption To help enable banking clients to securely and confidently share sensitive information with partners, suppliers and customers, the Center of Excellence will feature the latest in IBM System z mainframe technology offerings—including cryptography coprocessors and accelerators—as well as the company's most recent encryption strategies.

Virtualization To help financial institutions understand and realize the asset utilization benefits of virtualization—the Center of Excellence team will help clients build a business case for virtualization by demonstrating the exceptional capabilities of IBM System z mainframe technology, which can support hundreds of distributed servers in a virtual environment.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) The IBM Center of Excellence will showcase a robust, flexible SOA environment on the mainframe. This environment will feature an added capability that allows existing business logic contained within core systems to be exposed as Web services as part of an SOA—enabling banks to run new workloads alongside existing applications.

"Future-Proof" Innovation To help banking clients "future-proof" their existing environments, the Center of Excellence will highlight IBM support of open standards and flexibility in distributed server environments using UNIX® APIs, J2EE™, grid computing standards and Linux®.

At the core of the IBM Banking Center of Excellence (Center of Excellence) is IBM System z mainframe technology.

Throughout the IBM System z server family, IBM provides world-class IBM mainframe technology to help today's financial services enterprises respond to business conditions quickly and with flexibility. From automation to advanced virtualization technologies and open industry standards, IBM mainframes help deliver competitive advantages for the on demand bank.

IBM System z technology leads in delivering world-class application availability and overall business resiliency. No other computing platform has integrated availability-enhancing features throughout its architecture as long as or as thoroughly as the IBM mainframe—over 40 years in the making.

In addition, IBM System z servers are designed to deliver the system integrity and security-rich solutions needed to help meet today's financial institutions' on demand operating environment security requirements.

• Poughkeepsie, New York, U.S.
• Seoul, Korea
• Silicon Valley, California, U.S.