After unprecedented business growth over the last 18 months, Saambou has increased its investment in enterprise servers to the tune of R2.6 million with the purchase of a large IBM CPU upgrade from PQ Africa`s data centre specialists, Persetel.
The growth in Saambou`s customer base resulted in an exponential growth in the IT environment and to accommodate the increased workload demand, Saambou embarked on a procurement process. Persetel, a Saambou partner for over 20 years, was again elected as the IT business partner of choice.
"Saambou`s year-end is at the end of March, and this requires additional processing resources," comments Johan Opperman, regional sales representative at PQ Africa. "The proposed increase in processing throughput addressed all the critical areas of concern that Saambou had."
The group grew to one of the top five in the country and was the founder of Saambou Holdings Limited, which was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1987. The group`s banking and building society operations were consolidated in 1991 and a forward looking strategic direction instituted by senior management, saw the birth of Saambou Bank Limited, which now trades as the group`s operating company. Less than 3 million instructions per second (Mips) worth of processing power were installed when it first started but Saambou now has over 200 Mips available.
The installation was a joint effort between IBM customer engineers and Persetel system engineers who performed the task with less than three weeks to go before Saambou`s year end. The installation had to coincide with a public holiday when the expected workload was at its lowest.
"It is critical that any installation in a bank environment goes smoothly and quickly because of a need for 24 hour service on our ATM`s countrywide," says Frik van Rensburg of Saambou. "The installation took approximately two days and we went live on the Monday night. Minor teething troubles were sorted out on the Tuesday morning."
Van Rensburg adds that the transaction volume on the database exceeds 100million hits per day. Opperman says the success of this installation sends a clear message to other potential customers about the strength of the Persetel-IBM relationship.
"Customers can now expect to benefit from the best of both worlds - Persetel`s unequalled customer support and IBM`s superior product offerings."
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Persetel
Persetel (Pty) Limited was formed in June 1999 through the merger of Persetel Open Systems and Persetel Mainframe Systems to supply guaranteed, business-critical data centre solutions.
A subsidiary of IT giant PQ Africa, Persetel is a leading player in the South African data centre industry, with particular strengths in enterprise-wide business-critical systems, including enterprise storage, storage area networks, data warehousing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). By adding real business value to its customers, Persetel`s business-focused technology solutions reduce the risk normally associated with the implementation of complex data centre solutions. It has close relationships with leading vendors in the data centre including EMC and IBM, which enables the offering of a solution set, rather than product groups.
Competitive advantage, service excellence and improved profitability have long been the cornerstones of Persetel`s business. Thanks to a carefully selected range of leading-edge products, strategic alliances and partnerships, Persetel is able to provide greater choice, better business value and tailor-made solutions for its customers.
Persetel`s head office is in Sandton, with regional offices in Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. The company also has the ability to draw on skills from within the PQ Africa group and from its business partners world-wide.