Bank OCBC NISP, the fourth-oldest bank in Indonesia, was established in Bandung in 1941 as Bank NISP. It evolved into a solid and reliable bank, catering mainly to the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment. Bank NISP became a commercial bank in 1967, was licensed as foreign exchange bank in 1990, and listed its shares on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in 1994. At the end of 2008, OCBC Bank-Singapore had become the controlling shareholder and supported Bank NISP in reaching national bank status and becoming a top-five commercial bank (excluding government and foreign banks) in Indonesia. To optimize the relationship with OCBC Bank Singapore, Bank NISP changed its name to Bank OCBC NISP in December 2008.

The challenge: Provide timely customer service at multiple branches

In the past, Bank OCBC NISP’s 352 branch offices had to wait for the completion of parameter copying processes at the head office in Bandung before they could get up and running with the day’s business operations. As every process had to be initiated with proper access and application authorization, it was always impossible to deliver services to customers on time.

”We were frequently delayed in serving our customers because the available bandwidth was insufficient to enable us to quickly download large amounts of data,” said Anthonius Satryo Wibowo, head of research and planning, Bank OCBC NISP. Initially, the data size was 5 MB, but it continued to rise until it reached 27 MB. It could take one to two hours just to download the data—that was, if the branches were lucky enough not to experience any time-out errors.

The other challenge faced by Bank OCBC NISP was managing and controlling the applications and databases at the branches. The problem culminated when Jakarta was hit by a flood in February 2008. One of the branches was completely crippled because its servers were flooded. “Our vendor almost threw in the towel trying to fix it,” said Filipus H. Suwarno, head of the Information Technology Division.

To solve the problems, Bank OCBC NISP decided to find an easy-to-use and integrated system that would help it manage the local applications and centralize them at the head office.

Implementing an application virtualization solution from Citrix

PT Mitra Integrasi Informatika (MII), a subsidiary of PT Metrodata Electronics, Tbk., and a Citrix Solution Advisor, came to the rescue by introducing Citrix® XenApp™ to Suwarno and his team. XenApp is an application virtualization solution that effectively meets the application delivery and management requirements of a company with a large number of branches in widely dispersed locations.

With the Citrix solution, the applications formerly installed on application and database servers at the branches reside at the head office where they are managed centrally. XenApp eliminates the complex updating and versioning of applications at each of the branches. The solution delivers applications with good performance over network bandwidth of 128 Kbps for a branch office with around 10 workstations. This translates into substantial savings in communication costs between the branches and the head office. Productivity, control and availability are significantly improved while operating costs are reduced.

Branches open promptly to serve customers

With XenApp, Bank OCBC NISP’s IT team can efficiently manage applications and databases from a single point and deliver them with high availability and performance to all branches.  Now, at exactly 8:00 a.m. each business day, all the branch offices can open their doors and start serving their customers punctually.

Another aspect of improved service is faster approval of transactions. Before the implementation of XenApp, a branch manager, who might have to supervise three to five branches, had to be in his base office to perform such approval requests. Today, a manager can do this at the nearest branch office. The same is true with marketing teams, comprised of highly mobile employees―they no longer have to return to the office where they are based to enter data for prospective customers.

In addition, efficiency is felt every time the bank opens a new branch, as it is no longer necessary to install the applications at the new premises. All the applications can simply be published out of the head office. “Today, with XenApp, it takes us only two days to get a new branch ready for operation. Formerly, we would require at least seven days to install all the applications, one at a time,” said Suwarno.

Another key benefit is prominent each time the bank has to upgrade its systems or applications because today, the IT team only has to do it once on the servers at the head office. Within just a couple of minutes, all the branch offices that are using the applications will receive the latest updates. In the past, the upgrade had to be done on each and every computer. Imagine how unproductive it was when this process had to be repeated for 4,000 computers, plus one or two servers at each branch.

As far as Suwarno is concerned, the Citrix deployment is highly strategic and has helped his team manage the bank’s daily operations both from the IT and the user perspectives. ”Now everything is running faster and management is a lot easier. The support from MII has also been excellent. We were also very impressed that the Citrix team made an effort to help us when we encountered some issues with the implementation, and we truly appreciate that,” he said.

Bank OCBC NISP, the recipient of the Banking Service Excellence Award 2008, uses Citrix XenApp to deliver its core banking applications. XenApp has become the benchmark for other banks in Indonesia. “For us, providing full support to the branches and the users with high availability is crucial, as it ensures the readiness of our system every time an employee uses it in serving our customers,” Suwarno concluded.

About Citrix XenApp

XenApp, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows®-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. XenApp is the most complete application virtualization system available. It offers the ability to virtualize applications on both the client side and server side, delivering them on demand based on the user, the application or the location (online or offline).

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