Westpac NZ renews five-year IT services deal with IBM

Westpac New Zealand has renewed its IT outsourcing agreement with IBM which will see new technologies deployed and existing system upgrades.

The agreement was first signed in 2000 and was renewed in 2006, Westpac spokesman Chris Miriams said.

Mr Miriams said the value of the contract with IBM was not something Westpac discussed publicly.

IBM is responsible for Westpac’s IT infrastructure services including mainframes and midrange systems, storage, security, data centre network services and workplace printing.

IBM New Zealand global technical services general manager Andrew Fox said Westpac’s data centre services were currently hosted in a Gen-I facility and not IBM’s $80 million Auckland centre, launched this year.  Mr Fox said these services would be operated and managed by IBM.

He said part of the deal, signed in September, was a transformational aspect which involved replacing some of the bank’s old systems and platforms with new ones that were more energy efficient.

“More bang for your watt, in terms of energy and obviously part of that is virtualizing lots and lots of existing systems onto fewer new ones.”

Mr Fox said virtualizing involved running multiple systems, which would previously have taken several servers, on one more powerful and energy efficient server.

He said this was cheaper for the client in terms of power and hardware.

Mr Fox said two z196 mainframes, IBM’s latest mainframe technology, would be installed.

Mr Fox said the new agreement would bring enhanced security and network technology to the existing IT infrastructure and help the bank get to where it wanted to go in the future.

A release from IBM said new automation tools for provisioning and managing the IT environment would be implemented, improving the time to market for new IT solutions in the bank.

Mr Fox said IBM was unable to give the value of the deal.

“As you’ll imagine from the size of the bank and the scope of the work that we’re doing for them it’s significant for us and for them.”

Westpac customer and technology services general manager Jim Stabback said the bank was pleased to renew that had proved to be a successful and constructive long term relationship.

“It supports the Bank's strategy of making it easier and faster and providing an experience that delights our customers."