BNP Paribas partners with IBM to transform its IT infrastructure to a flexible and innovation driven

BNP Paribas and IBM have signed a multi- year services agreement worth up to 1-billion-Euro. Key element of the agreement is that BNP Paribas and IBM will set up a single purpose joint venture to transform the banks IT into an on-demand infrastructure.Both BNP Paribas and IBM will staff this new entity to help BNP Paribas achieve additional performance improvements and cost savings. BNP Paribas views its IT performance as key to the groups competitive advantage. BNP Paribas wants to further improve its ability to respond quickly to new market requirements and optimize its information technology infrastructure. The joint venture with IBM enables BNP Paribas to maintain the highest skill levels of its technical staff, to manage its information technology proactively and to improve service flexibility. Once the transformation to an on demand IT infrastructure is complete, the partnership with IBM will enable BNP Paribas to manage cost optimally, which is critical in the highly competitive banking industry. The new joint venture will provide services to operate BNP Paribas IT service infrastructures and will employ 450 staff. It deploys computing power on mainframes estimated at 26 billion operations per second (26,000 MIPS), an online storage capacity of 400,000 billion characters (400TB), and 7000 servers.