ING U.S. Financial Services is outsourcing its IT operations to IBM in order to reduce costs and lay the foundation for strategic business projects. "We're going to be moving ING to an on demand environment where we're going to build and leverage our UMI [Utility Management Infrastructure] technology to streamline their IT infrastructure," says IBM Global Services financial services general manager Philip Guido. "We'll be developing tools, techniques, processes--leveraging our technology, our innovations, our software to move this infrastructure to one of our centers in Boulder, [Colo.]" Guido says the move will also provide ING with superior disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities -- a must-have in the financial services sector. ING plans to reinvest the money it saves from outsourcing its mainframe and midrange operations to IBM in new business applications. Before the implementation of UMI, IBM will consolidate ING's IT assets, including standardising desktop hardware and reducing the number of software images requiring IT support. Once in place, the UMI-enabled on demand computing model will allow ING to scale its computing resources according to business requirements in real time, according to ING U.S. Financial Services CIO Paul Donovan. Copyright 2003 INFORMATION, INC. |
