Crédit Immobilier de France Chooses IBM’s on Demand Technology for Greater Customer Responsiveness

Crédit Immobilier de France Chooses IBM’s on Demand Technology for Greater Customer Responsiveness

IBM today announced that Crédit Immobilier de France (CIF), one of the leading French financial institutions, has chosen IBM as its strategic systems technology provider. CIF is looking to improve customer service across multiple locations and address new government regulations. CIF will replace existing products from IBM and HP with cutting edge IBM on demand technology offering breakthrough virtualization capabilities to help simplify their IT infrastructure.

The company consolidated five servers and a multitude of heterogeneous storage systems onto one IBM eServer iSeries 570 system and one IBM TotalStorage DS8000 system. The IBM technology infrastructure is designed to power 300 offices with more than 2,400 employees.

Financing of mortgage loans is a very competitive market in France and specialized companies like CIF are up against traditional banks who can offer a broader portfolio of financial services to customers. This situation calls for CIF to be even better and more efficient than traditional banks by continuously offering new and innovative, high quality services while at the same time minimizing IT and administration costs.

With the completion of this technical project, 17 IT service centers have been consolidated into one center. Crédit Immobilier de France has been able to consolidate five servers, including HP 9000, to one IBM eServer iSeries system running only three operating systems (i5/OS, AIX and Windows), and leave behind a multitude of different storage systems in favour of one single DS 8000 solution. Furthermore, the simplified solution has made it possible to run the whole installation using one unified IT team and to reduce staff needs.

“By implementing the very latest technology from IBM we now have an IT infrastructure which will help Crédit Immobilier de France reduce costs and work more efficiently, and in this way contribute to improve our company’s margins. But even more important is that this simplified and virtualized IT infrastructure allows us to better address changes and new demands in the marketplaces by being more agile and able to launch new offerings to our clients. This infrastructure makes CIF more competitive,” says Marc Bergougnoux, Managing Director of GIE i-CIF, the IT arm of Crédit immobillier de France.

Read the complete Press Release