sbi migrates 20,200 branch networks to mpls cloud in 12 months - cio india news on _ cio

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SBI Migrates 20,200 Branch Networks to MPLS Cloud

in 12 MonthsAdded 16th Jan 2015

By Yogesh Gupta

Dimension Data migrated State Bank of Indias

network of 20,200 branches and offices from

point-to-point circuits to an MPLS cloud in a

record time of 12 months.

Dimension Data as the implementation partner

of SBI had a detailed roadmap to plan, design,

build and manage the SBI Connect MPLS-

based network to its current size and to lay the

foundation for rolling out innovative and

inclusive banking services.

This project is unique because of the impact it would have on the banks overall vision to

accelerate financial inclusion in the country, align technology with other business objectives while

improving the operational efficiency of the bank.

In an exclusive interaction with CIO, Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, Dimension Data India and Arundhati

Bhattacharya, Chairperson, State Bank of India, explained the intricacies of one of the fastest

MPLS migrations in the banking industry in India.

Dimension Data has a 12-year association with SBI.Initially the project appeared fairly daunting

and very challenging to implement in a 12 month period. The original project plan was twice the

one-year period. But it was business requirement we had to fulfill as SBI wanted to roll out new

applications much faster, says Kiran Bhagwanani, CEO, Dimension Data India.

If you look at the kind of applications that we are putting onto the system and the way we have

increased our business as well, this was really the need of the hour. We needed to provide bettercustomer service and also be able to capture various data for risk management in much shorter

periods of time, says Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, State Bank of India.

The sheer volumes of data capture as well as the volume of business were the key requirements

necessitating the migration project, according to Bhattacharya.

The large project in record time was a kind of world record of sorts. There have been several

large banks in India with about 3,000 branches which have taken several months and sometimes


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well over a year to migrate, says Bhagwanani.

Overcoming Challenges

Dimension Data raised the project criticality and the time period

with the chairman and senior management at BSNL to enlist their

support and also leveraged SBI IT team to overcome the

challenges.

The biggest apprehension was the short timeline. SBI has over

20,200 branches spread across India, with branches present in

almost every part of 35 states and union territories of India. The

other big question was the availability of MPLS signal and

infrastructure in every nook and corner of India. The third

concern was getting the project underway without causing

disruptions to the banks existing network.

We were quite sure that migration was the only route for us. We wanted an agile and secure

network and also cost efficiencies and lesser downtime, says Bhattacharya.

To deliver this project Dimension Data had to augment the number of resources they had on

ground as well as their NOC. The big challenge was running two parallel networks across the

brancheskeeping the mission critical applications runningwhile creating a new network. We

couldnt afford to have adverse incidents on the live network as we were creating a new one

during migration, says Bhagwanani.

Dimension Data substantially added resources to their team of 650 people that operates the SBI

network. The service provider also added manpower at its NOC to ensure smooth branch-by-

branch migration. A project office created at SBIs global IT center at Belapur in Navi Mumbai

conducted daily tracking, communicating daily progress reports to SBI.

The phase-wise approach included migration of metros and tier-I cities followed by tier-II cities.

Availability of MPLS infrastructure in a small part of the country was a challenge. The service

providers team worked in close association with BSNL engineers to meet project goals.

The team also faced challenges in the form of unpredictable natural calamities. Be it the Vizag

Cyclone or the J& K Flood, they took some focus away as project plans had to redrawn a few

times for these unexpected situations, says Bhagwanani. In his view immaculate planning was

critical to completing the project on time.


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IT-enabled Bank

At SBI bandwidth is not a constraint anymore for any application,

be it video, or audio, across its 20200 branches. Some branches

which were on 128 kbps or lesser bandwidth now get access to a

multi-channel environment. Bandwidth has become faster and

network has become more agile. Secondly, the uptime on the

network becomes better because of more redundancy built into

MPLS technology. It also helps SBI with their opex as network is

simplified. Electricity and utility costs can come down because of

the simplified network, says Bhagwanani.

We now get better bandwidth wherever we need it given BSNLs

capabilities. When we are rolling out more applications, we can

increase the bandwidth in those branches, says Bhattacharya.

SBI delivers its banking services all across, including large and small cities, small towns and

villages. The most common problem faced at the remote branches is slow application access

leading to disruption in services. With MPLS the bank hopes to minimize disruptions and deliver

superior customer experience.

There is less downtime now and the maintenance costs are coming down. We are seeing

business benefits from day one as we enable the branches with many more applications which

earlier was not possible due to limited bandwidth, she says.

Bhagwanani says SBIs network is ready to scale up to handle massive amounts of traffic likely to

be generated once the accounts opened under the governments financial inclusion scheme Jan

Dhan Yojna become active.

He says that the critical success factors of this massive project were the extremely deep

commitment of SBI and 100 percent support given by BSNL.

We were aware of the pains involved in migration projects. Considering the type of pain points we

could have encountered, the experience has been much better what we have feared it would be,

says Bhattacharya.

sbi migrates 20,200 branch networks to mpls cloud in 12 months - cio india news on _ cio

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