Oman Arab Bank (OAB) has chosen IBM technology to improve its e-business agility and increase competitiveness.
Working closely with IBM’s regional partner Gulf Business Machines (GBM), the bank said the implementation has enabled it to enhance customer service through an open standards based and a tightly integrated virtualised computing environment.
As long term user of IBM technologies, it added it expects the new system will enable increased responsiveness to its retail banking, corporate, investment, trade business, government and business banking customers.
“Highly advanced technology is a critical enabler in the banking industry, essential for competitive advantage and helping to drive differentiation, speed to market, and ability to capitalise on new opportunities,” said Amr Refaat, IBM GM for Middle East and Pakistan.
“IBM and GBM are working closely with OAB to help the bank reduce costs, increase return on investment and optimise business processes,” Refaat added.
OAB has invested in state of art technology and service oriented architecture (SOA) standards as an integration enabler of B2B and B2G services, allowing it to add value to its proposition through more efficiently delivered services tailored to customer needs.
“Our approach has meant that we can provision new computing capacity on demand using IBM servers, blade center and storage, within minutes as opposed to hours and/or days”, said Hassan Abdul Ali Mohammed, deputy GM and head of IT at OAB.
“Speed to market is crucial to gaining competitive advantage and this, together with the strong integration capability provided by IBM and GBM, allows us to launch new applications and associated customer services quickly,” he added.
OAB expects its the strategic decision to invest further in disaster recovery to minimise business risk.
The integrated IT system was implemented using IBM WebSphere software and IBM server and storage virtualisation products, including IBM Power Systems and IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller.
“Throughout our ongoing relationship with OAB, we aim to ensure its IT infrastructure is up-to-date with the latest IBM technologies. The solutions implemented are aimed at providing a stable, reliable and well-suited platform to cater to the bank’s specific requirements,” said Oliver Mouries, country GM of GBM Oman.
OAB has been using IBM technology for the past decade to upgrade and improve its underlying infrastructure to its current mature level. The agreement was signed in Q1 2012.
