FirstRecovery capacity, service boosted by Persetel

When First National Bank merged with Rand Merchant Bank to become FirstRand, it was one of the biggest banking mergers this country has ever seen. And FirstRand subsidiary FirstRecovery could maintain its competitive edge throughout the merger process, thanks to a solution provided by Persetel, one of the PQ Africa Group of Companies.

The deal, a Persetel Katana 9/94 Model 355 processor, ensured that FirstRecovery`s mainframe customers could continue to rely on the company for specialist disaster recovery hosting and testing during the process.

"At 940 MIPS, we are the largest provider of mainframe disaster recovery capacity in the SA market," says Francois Muscat, MD of FirstRecovery. "We offer large organisations such as banks whatever processor and disk capacity they need, in addition to services that ensure effective disaster recovery for their critical systems." Muscat says Persetel was chosen because it could provide a solution that worked for FirstRecovery.

"Persetel`s solution set of CMOS technology, high performance and a guaranteed upgrade path met all of the criteria we were looking for," he says. "The final switchover took only four hours thanks to the preparation by Persetel."

Says PQ Africa business development director, Keith Roberts: "They went with us because of our value-added services and our track record. With us, it`s not a simple transaction. Whatever the challenge, we will extend ourselves in our commitment to make our customers successful. The excellent service and support history on all their enterprise hardware equipment and the team headed by Paul Basmatzian, Ted Carlson, Japie van der Merwe and Roger Gannaway, ensured that we excelled in this business."

According to Roberts, the new model will reduce the cost of operations by replacing ageing technology with newer, faster equipment and with a very favourable cost of ownership model. "First Recovery also needed additional capacity to cater for the growing number of clients and usage capacity by these clients," he says. "Having a bigger and more powerful footprint with scalability to even larger processing capacity enables FirstRecovery to bid for business growth. Acquiring more and larger clients also achieves a cost synergy for its users, whilst increasing its revenue stream with additional clients."

The bid was fought by the three main solution providers in the local market. "The winner had to demonstrate that it was capable of delivering on the promises of an excellent service infrastructure, with a track record that had been tried and tested and finally the value added services such as customer and software engineering support and commitment to the success of the enterprise," comments Etti Poggi, executive director, PQ Africa, Johannesburg Sales Office. "To these qualities we added our aggressive cost of ownership model which tilted the balance in our favour."

The sales cycle commenced early in March last year and was concluded in December. The complex process included capacity planning by both Persetel`s and FirstRecovery`s teams, growth projections and modelling of the various growth scenarios.

"Naturally pre-sales support is backed up by the team of hardware and software engineers who must familiarise themselves thoroughly with the environment. Following all these preliminaries, the client was in a position to produce a tender document outlining their requirements which was then released to all interested parties," he adds.

"A lot of work is involved," he says. "We are dealing not only with a hardware installation, which in itself is a challenging exercise, but also with migrating and accommodating workloads from different platforms. All these activities have to meet strict deadlines and there is no compromise for non-delivery."