ACADEMIA

In tandem with the BAI Retail Delivery Systems Conference, Sun Microsystems today announced that Thailand's second largest commercial bank, Krung Thai Bank (KTB), has replaced its core banking system with Sun Microsystems to help deliver faster, more flexible services to its customers. KTB implemented the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), Sun's flagship OS, running Sun Fire E12K servers and Sun StorEdge SE9980 System. The previous system required extensive, costly upgrades and maintenance, hindering the roll-out of new competitive services, such as customer portals and payment applications. "The old system was not able to keep up with this dynamic business climate," said Chaichan Kangwanpong, chief information officer, KTB. "Since Sun systems are based on open standards, we were able to convert 600 branches and 13 million accounts in a single weekend. With our rapid growth and aggressive goals to be the number-one bank in Thailand, our previous system hit a brick wall in terms of performance and flexibility, severely hampering our ability to compete. So we decided to create what we know is the world's largest real-time core system in the world - the primary data center on which all banking applications run. We knew we required the scalability, security and performance of Sun's hardware and software innovations. Since migrating our system to Sun, the promises of increased performance and reduced price have been delivered beyond our expectations." State-owned KTB is a dynamic commercial operation whose 14,500 staff became frustrated when the Tandem and HP-based legacy system began hindering the ambitious goals of rapidly rolling out these new on-demand services. Initially, KTB tried to upgrade and tweak the performance of its older system to be more flexible and allow easier integration of new services; however, KTB quickly found the cost and complexity to be overwhelming. After extensive research, KTB chose Fidelity Profile, Fidelity Information Services' core-banking solution running on Sun's Solaris OS and Sun Fire servers to power the new system. "Although Fidelity Profile is optimized for several systems, Sun Fire servers running Solaris OS convinced us that the days of the 'big iron' mainframe were over. Our benchmarks showed our application improves dramatically when tested on Sun," said Frank Sanchez, President, Fidelity Information Services. "The implementation at KTB proves that real-time-Unix implementation can support, and even surpass, the processing requirements of the world's largest banks." "Fidelity and Sun share the same goal of helping banking customers like KTB improve the performance of their systems at an overall lower cost to them," said Donna Rubin, senior director of financial services, Sun Microsystems. "KTB is yet another example of Sun working with the world's largest banks to help them meet even the most ambitious goals. This win reconfirms that Sun continues to hold a global leadership position as the most trusted and preferred open systems vendor in financial services."