March 2, 2004
(IDG News Service)
Deutsche Postbank AG said on Friday that it has doubled its IT infrastructure to deal with its new SAP AG software and is planning to process transactions for two German banks.
Deutsche Postbank's SAP system, set up in October 2003 and running on IBM hardware, processes over 10 million transactions per day and could easily handle double that figure, said Postbank press officer Hartmut Schlegel. The SAP system is designed to manage customer transactions from the company's online and interactive voice-response services, plus its 9,000 branch offices.
In addition, Deutsche Bank AG and Dresdner Bank AG have said they will outsource their payment transactions to Bonn-based Deutsche Postbank later this year, Schlegel said.
SAP was brought in to replace a system running on Fujitsu-Siemens Computers (Holding) BV equipment that was barely keeping up with the demands put upon it, Schlegel said. The new system handles transactions and stores details of individual checking accounts. Later this year, modules for savings accounts and loan accounts will be added, and the system is capable of creating and handling new products, such as checking accounts with loan facilities included, Schlegel said.
The new SAP software will allow Deutsche Postbank to offer processing services to other banks, Schlegel said. The last details of the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank contracts are being finalized, he said. Postbank is interested in bringing other banks into the system, which Schlegel said can easily be expanded to meet increased demand.
Deutsche Postbank will take customer transaction data from other banks and process it on its own system, Schlegel said. The bank has handwriting-reading technology that will eventually allow handwritten payment forms, such as checks, to be handed in at a Dresden Bank branch, for example, and sent to Postbank to be dealt with automatically. This isn't fully up and running, however, so Postbank staff will handle the process in the meantime, Schlegel said.
Postbank has centralized all IT hardware at a data center in Bonn. The IT hardware was previously spread across six centers around Germany, and the centralization has reduced costs, Schlegel said. The IBM equipment installed includes four IBM z900 mainframes to be used as SAP database servers with DB2 for z/OS as the database for SAP account management.
Eight IBM eServer p690 systems with Power4 processor technology and up to 32 processors each have been installed as SAP application servers, and four ESS 800 disk systems have been installed, providing a total storage capacity of more than 40TB. Data is mirrored to a remote data center via peer-to-peer remote copy to provide security, IBM said in a statement.
This infrastructure can expand if Deutsche Postbank attracts other banks to use its processing system, Schlegel said.