DBS Bank : Leading Financial Group in Asia

Overview

Need

• Upgrade EverFlex Managed Services, address service level gaps and manage growing storage needs regionally.

Solution

• Redefined DBS’s storage capacity needs and implemented fully on premise managed storage services that in in compliance with local regulator needs.

Outcome

• Comprehensive end-to-end cost effective storage EverFlex managed services.
• Effective contractual and legal discussion.
• Superior technology with high availability and resiliency.
• Protection of investment with Hitachi’ technology roadmap.
• Proven migration methodology
• Improved service level, regional expansion can now be implemented with ease across DBS’ regional offices in China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia and Taiwan

The Need

DBS Bank Ltd is a leading financial services group in Asia, with over 280 branches across 18 markets. Headquartered and listed in Singapore, DBS is a market leader with over four million customers and also has a growing presence in the three key Asian axes of growth, namely, Greater China, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The bank aims to become the Asian bank of choice. DBS seeks to intermediate trade and investment flows between Asia’s key regions of growth that includes Greater China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

DBS has been working with IBM Global Services since 2002. IBM provided a single tier, managed storage services that included a pay-per-usage of all SAN Storage and SAN fabric regionally. Five years ago, DBS also purchased EMC VMAX for their Mainframe storage. Increasing storage needs led the bank to subsequently buy another pair of EMC VMAX for their Open-Systems. With this purchase, EMC storage became a standard for their regional offices in Asia Pacific. The storage vendor mix in DBS comprised about 80% IBM and 20% EMC. To minimize rising costs, DBS engaged EMC to provide them with alternative options. However, the vendor was unable to propose a cost effective solution.

In addition to rising costs, DBS had to ensure that it in compliance with the business services availability requirements set by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The bank had been experiencing frequent outages caused by its IT services. The DBS management team needed to address this gap in their IT infrastructure. To address consumer needs, the bank also needed a system that will enable them to deliver new product applications to the market quickly.

DBS needed to address four challenges; the increasing cost of maintaining their existing systems; rapid storage growth, which has resulted in a 30% Y-o-Y increase of its storage usage costs; compliance with regulators for business continuity requirements and speed to market to deliver new product applications.

Solution

The Hitachi’ team worked with various teams in DBS, including their procurement team to gain a deeper understanding of the bank’s contracts with their incumbent vendors. The Hitachi team also worked with the DBS’ Legal and Compliance teams to fully understand the MAS compliance needs.

To address DBS’ needs they designed a new storage landscape and a formal commercial proposal for DBS’ latest storage project. It was crucial for the Hitachi team to succeed as they would be up against DBS’ incumbent vendors, IBM and EMC as well as a competitive tender by NetApp.

Throughout this process, the Hitachi team ensured that their proposal was in line with DBS’ requirements and were proactive in sharing regular updates. This process ensured that Hitachi maintained transparency and allowed the team to obtain feedback from DBS quickly.

Outcome

DBS chose to work with Hitachi because the positioning for the solution was clear with tangible benefits on data availability and security. To address DBS’ regulatory needs, Hitachi team established a detailed plan for migration and risk mitigation. The Hitachi team were able to address and resolve any technical and commercial queries quickly. The Hitachi team successfully secured a 5-year contract that is valued at an approximate forecast of $15 million USD.

Moving forward, Hitachi will be working with DBS to roll-out the Singapore Virtual Private Cloud, solutions for its regional offices as well as solutions for Brocade Tech Refresh, HCP for long term archiving and HPP for Virtual Tape Library.