Mumbai: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Union Bank of India (UBI) has selected IBM’s data center management services to enhance productivity and improve business operations. The service will enable the bank to enhance reliability and efficiency of critical infrastructure as well as significantly improve data management across multiple locations.

Union Bank of India is one of the largest public sector banks of India and is listed on Forbes 2000. The data center management services from IBM will include end-to-end infrastructure management for servers, storage and database for both production and disaster recovery sites. IBM will provide data center management services to UBI as part of a 7-year engagement.

Data sensitive industries like the financial sector require a robust IT infrastructure to ensure enhanced performance across multiple workloads, while at the same time reducing the overall cost. It is therefore critical for financial services companies to ensure that their data centers are highly efficient and optimally utilized.

UBI was keen to upgrade and automate their entire reporting system which includes infrastructure availability for core banking applications. IBM provisioned Tivoli Netcool tool to support end-to-end network view of more than 4000 branches and enabled proactive network alerts while delivering this core banking application access to all 4000 branches. IBM data center management solutions not only helped UBI to completely eliminate the manual reporting procedures, but also ensured seamless coordination within teams. The IBM solution provided a dashboard view, which helps the bank monitor their entire IT infrastructure and take precautionary measures to ensure continued operations.

“Data centers are the backbone of our business. We needed to ensure that they are equipped with the latest technology and optimally utilized. We chose to engage IBM because of their global expertise in designing and building innovative, energy efficient data centers.” said Ajit Kumar Rath, General Manager, Information Technology, Union Bank of India. “IBM’s data center services will enable UBI to build the IT environment needed to manage the changing requirements of our growing customer base.”

“Data is a core asset of any company, even more so in the financial sector. As UBI is a large financial institution with presence across the country, we had to take a holistic approach to address their IT infrastructure needs. Through our expertise in data centre management and our ability to build and manage several data centres for clients here, we have enabled UBI’s business to leverage data efficiently, while reducing the overall IT services costs,” said Lingraju Sawkar, Director, Integrated Technology Services, Global Technology Services, IBM India / South Asia.

Being the world’s largest builders and managers of data centers, IBM is helping organizations across sectors by creating optimized, flexible data centers that are aligned with their business goals. Organizations are increasingly moving towards outsourcing their data centers capabilities to increase efficiency, productivity, risk mitigation and scalability.