ING completes IT modernisation
ING Australia quietly completed its two-year IT modernisation program just before Christmas last year, it was revealed this week.
ING AU CIO: Greg Booker
(Credit: ING Australia)
ING Australia (ING AU) — a joint venture between Dutch ING Group (51 per cent) and ANZ Bank (49 per cent) — had completed its modernisation program just prior to Christmas, a spokesperson for ING AU told ZDNet.com.au today.
The two-year program, which coincided with the creation of ING AU's Customer Services division early last year, broadly aimed to streamline business processes and improve its e-business capabilities.
ING AU had partnered with Canadian outfit Speedware for the migration of applications to the new banking platform.
Greg Booker, ING Australia's chief information officer, said he was "extremely pleased" with the outcome of the project. "In the end, the project turned out to be very cost-effective," he said in a statement.
ING AU had attempted the notoriously tricky task of migrating applications to the new platform internally; however, that was abandoned in favour of using third-party migration services.
"We calculated that the cost of the re-hosting project, combined with the resulting maintenance costs over the next 10 years, would be four to five times less expensive than if we had continued with our rewriting project," Booker said.
The program was the catalyst for several high profile appointments throughout 2008, including Booker himself, who in April last year was lured away from his role at St George as its general manager of architecture and planning.
During the same draft, Booker's superior, ING AU chief operating officer for Customer Services, Fred Bertram, was nabbed from its joint-venture partner ANZ. Bertram had been ANZ's managing director of operations, technology and shared services in the bank's Bangalore, India facility.
Other scalps claimed by ING AU at the time included head of e-business Robert Liong, Westpac's former head of strategy and business architecture. ING AU's head of strategy and architecture Chris Tham joined from National Australia Bank, while Insurance Australia Group was tapped for IAG AU's head of application development and support, Fiona Floyd.
ING AU is set to make a decision on its IT outsourcing contract currently held by Telstra-owned KAZ. The deal covers the management of its mid-range servers, storage, operating systems, middleware and databases, which run on both Windows and Unix platforms and is set to expire in 2010.
Booker was unavailable for comment at the time of publishing the article.