Nutanix helps Asia United Bank Fulfill its Promise

CHALLENGE

Founded in the midst of the financial crisis that gripped East Asia in 1997, Asia United Bank (AUB) has since expanded its network to more than 200 branches nationwide and is recognized as one of the Philippines’ top 15 banks. In 2013, AUB became a publicly listed universal bank.

Technology has long been AUB’s key competitive differentiator. It is the only bank in the Philippines to have developed a proprietary core banking system, and 80 percent of the applications it uses were designed in-house. AUB is regularly the fastest to deploy new digital tools, including, for example, pioneering local kiosks--which eliminated the need for customers to queue to fill out forms--as well as being the first to convert cheques into electronic images.

However, the Filipino banking industry is rife with consolidation, with several small players recently acquired by larger organizations. “Competition is stiff,” said Raymund Mangahas, Vice President of IT Operations at Asia United Bank. “Over the past few years, I’d estimate we’ve seen 10-15 banks disappear, and there’s no sign of things slowing down in the near future.”

To maintain its position as a technological leader, AUB decided to embark on a hardware and software overhaul. “We were operating on a traditional infrastructure, but were using a number of different hardware and software providers, so our systems were fragmented. When something went wrong, there was no visibility – the team had to check each component individually,” Mangahas explained. “We knew that in order to continue delivering quality services to our customers, we needed to become faster, more agile and resilient. Nutanix offered a unified solution, where we could minimize complexity, better manage our systems, and scale or upgrade to match the needs of our growth.”

SOLUTION

Asia United Bank removed four servers, replacing VMWare ESXi with their native Nutanix hypervisor, AHV, while also using Nutanix Prism Pro to centralized management. “It didn’t take long to secure management buy-in when we showed them our 5-year cost savings estimates for maintenance and licensing,” commented Mangahas. In addition to their core banking system, AUB also deployed several other mission-critical applications on Nutanix, including web apps, MS SQL, and Oracle, which incorporated their CRM and HR management systems.

AUB was able to deploy Nutanix in a fraction of the time that it took to deploy their legacy infrastructure, and with no system downtime. Mangahas recalled, “It could not have been more straightforward – overall, the Nutanix implementation took less than a week, with no disruption to our day-to-day. To put that in context, when we originally installed our previous traditional infrastructure, it took us approximately 6 months due to a compatibility issue with our existing systems.

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

In addition to the seamless deployment, AUB has enjoyed a 20 percent reduction in maintenance and licensing costs. Thanks to the Nutanix integrated full stack and Prism, AUB now has much greater system visibility which has translated to a 50 percent reduction in the time required to manage and monitor systems for faults. “Productivity is definitely up – with Nutanix, we’ve eliminated complexity from our network and simplified our environment, enabling us to easily identify and rectify issues. We’re dependent on an external support team, so having a system that allows them to resolve an issue that could have easily taken a full day in a mere couple of hours is a big achievement.”

Meanwhile, AUB has also reduced its power consumption. “Our utility bills are easily down by as much as 20%, and getting rid of servers has saved us 6U in rack space, which we can repurpose.”

NEXT STEPS

Asia United Bank continues to operate on a mixture of traditional and Nutanix technology, but is looking to steadily phase out legacy three-tier infrastructure. “The next step is to deploy Citrix VDI on Nutanix and eliminate our physical desktops altogether. We also have plans in the pipeline to build a new data center capable of serving all our users, and are in discussions with Nutanix to support us,” said Mangahas.

“I’m very satisfied with our partnership to date,” he added. “We recently launched a new slogan – ‘Bank on us, anytime, anywhere’ – and with the Nutanix solution in place, I truly believe we can deliver on that promise. We’re confident that this is the way forward and will continue to advocate the benefits of Nutanix to anyone who will listen.”