Australian banks ANZ and WestPac are both tapping cloud technology for the testing and development of new software.
ANZ has signed for cloud specialist iTKO's Lisa, an end-to-end testing, validation and virtualisation suite that will be used for software development across the bank's technology division.
iTKO says its technology eliminates the dependencies on constrained systems and provides the necessary visibility into architectural changes that hamper communications between development and testing organisations.
Marcello Martino, head, testing, environments, and change CoE, technology global solution delivery, ANZ, says: "After an evaluation process that considered our existing technologies and future IT objectives, we ultimately decided that iTKO's complete Lisa Suite would reduce risk, cycle times and costs across our development and testing cycles."
Meanwhile, WestPac CIO Bob McKinnon has told local journalists that the bank has been working with Cisco, EMC and VMWare to build a local private cloud for testing and development.
The bank says that a major advantage of the cloud is that it enables the quick provision of new processing capacity and the cost savings associated with avoiding capital expenditure for new internal technology projects.
Last year another of Australia's major banks, CBA, was among the firms to first join a new global Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC), an alliance set up by industry association TM Forum to promote uptake of cloud services in the global enterprise and business-to-business market.
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