Banks are moving to integrate their IT systems as technology strives to meet the demands of business, says Herman Singh, technology engineering director at Standard Bank.
Speaking at the BMI-TechKnowledge African Banking Forum in Midrand yesterday, Singh said business was looking for value for money from IT.
This value translated into, among other things, the ability to keep systems running, having a good response time, ensuring good recovery plans and ensuring security and compliance with regulations.
Business was also demanding agility - the ability to launch new products quickly, create new businesses rapidly, and to implement new forms of customer service, all the while keeping costs down.
[VIDEO]"We`ve looked at it at a number of different levels," he said. "We firstly have to sweat the assets that we`ve got, so we`ve said: 'How can we convert that which we already have?`
"There`s a very high level of focus on integration, saying our average data servers in typical data centres globally are running at a utilisation level of about 15%. How do we get that up to 25? How do we get that up to 90?"
Existing technology could be integrated to a higher level, he said.
The creation of open standards was also an important component.
"Open standards really says that if you can build systems where the interfaces are clearly understood, knowledge is in the public domain, you are going to be better able to integrate, better able to develop and better able to support in the future, and that`s going to assist all those requirements that business has."
There was also a need for virtualisation, where capacity could be created, without being allocated to a business, and be redeployed to the point of current needs, thus eliminating trapped capacity that was not being used.
The final component was "smart software".
"The logic here says we just can`t expend support, costs and capacity on configuration and sorting and analysing. We really need the software to almost be self-healing in some respects, and in other respects to have levels of intelligence where it can sense the environment and configure automatically. And you`ll be seeing a lot more of this value being given."
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