IBM has entered into a
strategic, 10-year IT outsourcing agreement with India Infoline (IIFL), one of
the leading financial services providers in India, to transform its IT
Infrastructure and establish a direct linkage between business performance and
IT costs. 

The Rs 298 crore
agreement will help IIFL deliver a higher level of customer satisfaction,
ensure continuous audit readiness, strengthen its IT security framework and
compliance while at the same time provide better visibility and control of IT
operations.

This collaboration will
significantly improve customer experience for IIFL’ send customers by ensuring higher uptime for its broking
platform Traders Terminal”, speedier response and resolution of any technology
related issues. The scalable technology deployment will enable IIFL to roll out
enhanced functionality in shorter timeframes.

IBM will
take over the complete IT operations of IIFL which will entail managing more
than 700 IIFL branches spread across India. The complete IT infrastructure at
IIFL consists of more than 450 servers spread across five data centers and nine
local server rooms with over 15,000 end user assets distributed across its
branches. It will also includes a Wide Area Network that connects all IIFL
offices to the corporate offices in Mumbai and the entire application stack
that forms the core trading platform along with supporting enterprise
applications. IBM will also take over the entire application support for the
custom built application stack, based on an innovative co-managed support model
with IIFL’s Application Team.

IBM will setup a
centralized helpdesk, rollout a pan-India deskside services capability to
support users, applications and infrastructure in branches, and deploy service
management processes to cover assets, IT security, capacity, network, storage,
incident /problem/change, and technology, among others. 

With technology being
the core of financial services business, we need to ensure high availability of
predictable IT services in a highly regulated environment. The Indian financial
services market is at an inflection point slated for growth where technology is
the best enabler for higher penetration. We needed to have a proven partner in
this field. IBM came up with an innovative commercial model that will provide a
direct connection between business performance and IT costs, while enabling us
to scale operations at short notices” said Sankarson Banerjee, Chief
Technology Officer, IIFL Group.

This strategic services
deal with IIFL, will enable them to enhance their business value and gain
competitive advantage through innovative use of technology. With our
unparalleled domain expertise and technology competence, we are uniquely
positioned to build a reliable & robust IT model to realize IIFL’s
infrastructure transformation objectives,” said Karthik Shivram,
Director Sales, Strategic Outsourcing, Global Technology Services, IBM,
India/South Asia.

IBM will further help
IIFL in mitigating IT operational risks by reducing people dependency on
operations, eliminating points of failure and by extending business value of
existing applications.