The client
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) Group was formed in 1992 with the merger of Sumitomo Bank and Sakura Bank. It offers a broad range of financial services to its customers, including deposit taking, lending, securities brokering and trading, securities investment, money transfer, foreign currency exchange, corporate bond trustee services and custody services, financial futures underwriting, investment trust sales and other commercial banking activities. The group is also engaged in leasing, securities, credit card, investment, mortgage securitisation, venture capital and other credit related businesses. Like other financial services institutions, SMBC requires high availability of its IT infrastructure and applications, as systems downtime translates into lost revenues as well as a threat to the bank’s reputation.

The challenge
When SMBC relocated its London offices, it instigated a competitive tendering process for companies to deploy its IT infrastructure. The contract was awarded to Redstone Converged Solutions due to its technical capabilities and track record of delivering similar sized projects on time and to budget. These were key factors for SMBC, as they reduced the overall project risk. In addition, the fact that Redstone Converged Solutions has the in-house expertise to deploy an Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) solution was regarded by SMBC as a an important differentiating factor and meant that SMBC could derive value from the system from day one.

The solution
Reflecting on the project, SMBC staff were particularly satisfied with Redstone Converged Solutions’ project management capabilities. “A very positive aspect of how Redstone Converged Solutions does things is that it has accountability throughout the organisation for the whole project,” says SMBC’s Gary Biggerstaff, Global Head of Networks. “This goes all the way down to site operatives ensuring that things are done in accordance with the project plan, that waste is minimised, that everything is being done professionally and so on. This isn’t thrust into your face – it’s just the way they do business.” He continues, “Another really positive thing about Redstone Converged Solutions is its proactive attitude to problem solving. No matter how well planned it is every project has its problems, and it’s how you tackle these problems as they occur that really makes the difference between a satisfactory and unsatisfactory outcome.”

Keeping the project to deadline was a key driver for SMBC, which its staff felt was aided by the use of the Redstone Converged Solutions Logistics Centre in East London. The Logistics Centre has a pre-termination facility for copper and fibre solutions, and a converged network staging area that ensures all voice and data solutions are properly configured and tested to deliver a smooth project. SMBC’s network was preconfigured in the Logistics Centre, allowing faster deployment on site. SMBC’s staff noted that the pretermination facility added increased resilience to the project programme, helping to achieve tight delivery timescales. The Logistics Centre also ensured higher levels of performance upon implementation, as issues were resolved off-site before deployment.

The outcome
High levels of security are obviously essential for a bank and the new infrastructure will enhance SMBC’s multi-layered approach to this issue. “The new IIM system adds another method of detecting anomalous events or faults at a physical level,” comments Gary Biggerstaff. “When the IIM outputs are added to other consolidated outputs it enables us to analyse the root cause of these events. This allows reactive fault resolution, proactive service provisioning and enhances our security.”

“The construction of our new infrastructure also makes us more resilient to failure or malign attack,” explains Gary Biggerstaff. “It means we can cope with different types of failure and still keep our business running.”

“A resilient design is very important to us. It means we can survive more events. And since 9/11 and 7/7 business continuity has been a hot topic for us – business continuity now embraces more threats than the traditional fire and flood scenarios. We obviously have a business continuity facility,
but if we have to relocate there it affects our business and costs us a lot of money. If we can increase our resilience then we can avoid the need to relocate and therefore both the cost and the disruption involved in doing so.”