The ten-year $290 million outsourcing agreement inked earlier this year between Accenture and Caixa Catalunya, Spain's third largest savings bank, will involve a massive XP migration.
Accenture will help migrate all 1004 branches and seven corporate offices of Caixa Catalunya and its affiliates to XP. Caixa Catalunya group's approximately 7200 PCs and 1500 servers are Microsoft-based.
The bank decided to migrate to XP following recommendations from the systems plan survey. The migration will provide the bank with improved stability, reliability, security and system administration. The bank can also expect more flexibility in security policies and better scalability and availability on central servers, including e-mail servers, intranet servers, file servers and others.
As a result of the work being done by Accenture and its partners, the network of communications at bank branches will be renovated. Office XP tools could help boost employee productivity and employees will also have the possibility of using laptop computers in the corporate workplace.
Overall, Accenture says that Caixa Catalunya's Web-based desktop will be better aligned with its Web-based strategy. In addition, its infrastructure should be better aligned with its market strategy and better able to take advantage of future technological change.
Currently the bank is on a Windows NT based platform that is several years old. Microsoft support for Windows NT 4.0 is ending and some manufacturers of new hardware do not guarantee that their hardware will work correctly with Windows NT. Windows XP and Windows 2003 server were selected because they are mature and proven in the market and support for them is expected to continue for several years.
The project will be led and managed by Accenture and ITC, a company jointly owned by Caixa Catalunya and Accenture that also provides services to other clients in Spain. ITC, which currently has 294 employees, started with 35 people from Caixa Catalunya's IT department when it was formed in 1998. Nearly 90 members of its staff are former Accenture employees, and the rest were hired from the market. A team of 25 people from ITC, Accenture, Avanade, Coritel and BPM developed the project. In addition, Telefonica participated in the migration of both the CTI platform and the branches' network of communications; MicroBlanc participated on the project deployment; and Microsoft reviewed and certified the solution.
Over the course of the outsourcing contract, Accenture will provide Caixa Catalunya and its subsidiaries with virtually all IT functions, including infrastructure operations and maintenance, application maintenance, system integration, and technical help desk.
The outsourcing contract extends an earlier contract for similar services, signed in 1998. The existing projects that Accenture has done for Caixa Catalunya include the migration to IBM Z-Series and Z/OS, the installation of SUN clusters for Internet and treasury platforms, the deployment of broadband to branches and the installation of a multi-provider storage solution.
Caixa Catalunya has an asset volume of about €36,000 M (as of Dec. 31, 2004).