Standard bank goes XP

By Candice Jones, ITWeb online telecoms editor

Johannesburg, 06 Nov 2007

Standard Bank has upgraded its branch infrastructure at 831 branches across SA.

The eight-month project involved the migration of branches from IBM's OS 2 to Microsoft Windows XP.

Standard Bank CIO J"org Fischer says: "When this project was first initiated, Vista was not ready and would have required substantial application remediation and testing before implementation, which would have delayed our roll-out plans."

He says every workstation had to be rebuilt with Windows XP and virtualised OS 2, preparing the bank for the widespread implementation of SAP. "Grounding for this project included converting 230 branches to Ethernet from Token Ring, and implementing 1 200 data line upgrades."

According to Fischer, 8 937 desktops were upgraded from Pentium 3 to Pentium 4, including upgrades of 270 hard drives and 3 059 memory chips. Re-cabling and communications reconfigurations were also part of the process.

The project is part of the bank's move towards reducing its reliance on older technologies and employing, over time, a multi-channel, Windows-based Microsoft front-end and an SAP back-end system, explains Fischer. "This involved converting the bank's branches from OS 2 to a Microsoft Windows-based operating environment, which could support SAP applications."

He says SAP applications were already operational in some areas of Standard Bank. "The decision was essentially made because OS 2 is no longer a supported platform. This has obviously impacted on the availability of skills."

As for current technologies, there are more Microsoft and SAP-related speciality skills available for employ, he says. "While OS 2 has served the bank well since its adoption in the early 1990s, code is no longer being written for this operating system and drivers are a problem when new equipment is installed."

Fischer admits the bank encountered some problems. "Two branches out of 831 had to be moved back to OS 2 due to problems with their conversions. Once the problems were ironed out, these branches were fully switched over to the new system."

According to Fischer, the bank still has some way to go before fully retiring OS 2, although some systems have already been rewritten into the Microsoft Windows front-end.

Fischer declined to disclose the bank's investment in the upgrade.