ANZ has signed a five-year A$450 million deal with IBM to increase productivity and innovation across the Australian bank through the use of cloud-based services, mainframe technology and analytics software.
An essential pillar of the agreement is the creation of an 'Innovation Lab', as a co-investment between ANZ and IBM. The Lab, powered by Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform-as-a-service, will enable the bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services at a fraction of the time and cost previously taken.
Under the deal, IBM will deploy its newest z13 mainframe and Power8 infrastructure as part of ANZ’s private cloud environment. The infrastructure will provide the bank with the ability to better serve its mobile customers, and use big data analytics to gain deeper insights into its nine million customers worldwide.
ANZ chief information officer, Scott Collary says: “Understanding our customers’ needs and preferences around mobile and digital banking is critical to our business and to providing a superior customer experience. We therefore need to ensure we’re meeting these needs in an innovative, consistent and seamless way and with this partnership with IBM, we’re working to achieve this goal.”